How would we see the world if we could see polarized light?
I am often fascinated by one of Earth's most magnificent beings, the mantis shrimp (also known as 1-2-3-death). These beautiful animals have sixteen kinds of colour receptive cones - compare to our measly three! They can also see polarized light in ways that we cannot.
Which got me thinking... What if we had eyes more like the ones of those cute creatures, and could see polarized light the way they do?
How differently would we see everyday things? Would magic tricks, specially those based on smoke and mirrors work differently for us? Would we perceive the sky and the stars any differently?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/48888. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
With many more than three colour receptors, our colour TVs, using just three colours for display, would not come even close to showing all the colours of the world. Moreover, LDCs inherently work with polarized light; as is, they would probably look very unnatural. However, in principle this could be solved with a second LCD layer on the pixels; this would, however, make the displays twice as expensive, even before considering the extra colours.
It's not clear if we would really see more colours, as the additional dimensions in colour space might well be offset by a lower colour resolution, so while while we would see different colours for wildly different spectra that in our reality look exactly the same, similar spectra that already show different colours to us in the real world might in that hypothetical world look the same.
For a rough analogy (not to be taken too literally), consider a display with only two colour channels (say, red and blue) and three bits per channel, versus an ordinary three-channel display with two bits per channel. Both would have 6 bits available, therefore they both could display 64 different colours. The two-colour display could display more colour tones in the magenta segment (as the mixture of red and blue could be finer tuned), but in return could not display green at all.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads