Colour & the Perceiver

with: Ming Ronnier Luo (College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University); Maria Olkkonen (Principal Colour Scientist, Microsoft); and Bill Fischer (Digital Art & Design program at Kendall College of Art and Design)

Thursday June 15, 12:45-2:15pm Eastern.

Thanks to our speakers for their fascinating talks! A recording of the forum is available on our CLP youtube channel.

Part of Colour Impact 2023: Color and Human Experience. This was Part 3 of our series on Factors affecting colour perception.

Talk 1: Dr. Ming Ronnier Luo

Colour communication from design to production

Accurate and fast colour communication technology has been highly desired to achieve supply chain management. A system has been developed to achieve this by accurately simulating total appearance of the final product by projecting coloured light on white substrates. The appearance of the virtual samples can be precisely reproduced between systems. Designers can invent colours based on a colour selection tool and can visualise the same colour on multiple textured substrates. Colour specifiers can make crucial selection decision to finalise a digital colour specification. Dyers can accurate reproduce physical swatches to match the specification. Examples will be given to show how colours to be designers, to be specified, and to be reproduced.

Dr. Ming Ronnier Luo is a Professor at the College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University (China). He received his PhD from the Bradford University (UK) on colour science in 1986. He has published over 750 peer reviewed papers in the fields of colour science, imaging science and illumination engineering. He is a Fellow of Society of Dyers and Colouists (SDC) and of Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) . He has been an active member of CIE, ex-VP, ex-Division Director on Colour and Vision, Technical chairs. He has received numerous awards, including the Judd 2017 Award from the International Colour Association (AIC), and the Newton 2020 Award from the Colour Group of the Great Britain for his contribution in colour science research.

Talk 2: Dr. Maria Olkkonen

The role of context and memory in colour experience

Colour sensation arises through comparing the activation from more than one retinal photoreceptor type in visual information processing. Typical human observers have three types of cone photoreceptors sensitive to long, medium, and short wavelengths of visible light, producing a fundamentally three-dimensional colour representation. Our colour experience, however, cannot be fully explained by information processing at these early stages. The spatial and temporal context in which a stimulus is viewed, as well as previous experience with coloured stimuli affect how a given colour appears to a given observer. In other words, the physical properties of a coloured stimulus do not determine its colour appearance. In this talk I will first review the basic physiology of colour vision and then move on to discuss the ways perceptual context, short- and long-term memory, and prior knowledge interact with sensory information to create our colour experience. I will also touch on how these factors may give rise to individual differences in colour perception.

Dr. Maria Olkkonen holds a PhD in natural sciences from Justus Liebig University Giessen and is currently a Principal Color Scientist at Microsoft as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki. Before joining Microsoft, Dr. Olkkonen worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, and as an assistant professor at Durham University, UK. Her research focuses on human visual perception with a specialization in color perception and color constancy. She is especially interested in how short- and long-term memory affects and interacts with the perception of color. She uses behavioral methods to investigate perceptual responses to images and to quantitatively characterize the computational mechanisms of perception. She is a co-founder of the UK-based Colour Collective and a member of the Finnish Color Group

Talk 3: Bill Fischer

teaching universal and accessible design for colour vision diverse individuals

Bill’s presentation will lay out a sequential lesson, aimed at college level learners, that will provide outcomes centered around the understanding and application of accessible and universal design practices that can provide qualitatively equal experiences for persons with a wide range of sight-abilities, including colour-blindness.

Bill Fischer is a professor & founder of the Digital Art & Design program at Kendall College of Art and Design, and executive producer for The EPIC Project (a media production and research initiative), as well as author of the I-See-U blueprint for creating Inclusive, Socio-Emotional, Entertaining, and Universal media (www.i-see-u.info).