FYI, I don't normally answer AMA questions addressed to "everyone" or about extremely broad topics, because these are supposed to be low effort freebies while I grind out higher effort book pages. Unfortunately this one nerdbaited me because I really enjoy color science and wanted an excuse to nail down the visual ranges of the aliens.
Transcript
SIGSTKFLT asked: So, how does everyone's colour perception work?Humans:
Violet through red visual range with red-green-blue sensitive cells and low light vision cells. Brightest perceptual hue is yellow, darkest perceptual hue is violet.
Mel: Yellow appears brightest to us because it activates more of our retina cells.
Killian: Makes sense, our sun is yellow.
Avians:
Ultraviolet through red visual range with red-green-blue-UV sensitive cells and low light vision cells. Brightest perceptual hue is cyan, darkest perceptual hue is red.
Cheevwut: We're the only sophonts who can see UV. It's kinda annoying in co-species spaces. I feel like I'm spotting ghosts half the time around my human coworkers. Like, what do you mean you can't see that stain? It's right there! Our sense of color contrast clashes too. I hate when humans put
cyan text on white. It's so hard to read.
Ohwitiil: Or red on black.
Bug Ferrets:
Green through red visual range with red-yellow-green sensitive cells and heat/IR sensitive pit membranes. Brightest perceptual hue is orange, darkest perceptual hue is greenish cyan.
Gillie: (ASL) Bug ferret color vision is specifically geared to see the common colors of bioluminescent nectar and fruit sources in the tunnels of their homeplanet, giving them narrower sensitivity bands. Their heat pits functionally allow them to see infrared, but the image loses clarity if it's too hot and humid to keep the membrane cool. Fancier bug ferret screens have a heat pump layer to replicate the "color" of IR for digital images. I've heard they can lag badly with video, though.
Diagram cross-section of bug ferret pit eye:
- pit casing
- dermis
- skull plate
- muscle
- nasal cavity
- heat-sensitive membrane
Centaurs:
Blue through near infrared visual range with red-yellow-cyan sensitive cells and low light vision cells. Brightest perceptual color is golden yellow, darkest perceptual hue is sky blue.
Talita: Violet and indigo just kinda look grey to me... Near IR doesn't make my vision that different from a human's, but I sometimes get surprised by the missing red contrast when I look at things through my phone camera. Human RGB screens tend to look really washed out, especially the reds and cyan. And the slow refresh rate on cheaper models gives me a headache... I usually get 6-tone screens for my devices with a panspecies refresh speed.
23 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 20”
Vinemaple
Wow, thanks for letting yourself get nerdbaited, Jay! This made me realize that one of the reasons RttS grabbed me so hard was how your passion for speculative biology informs the character interactions and accessibility problems in the RttS world. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and it’s fascinating, because I always vaguely understood it was a thing, but I never considered it could be used to drive sci-fi; i always assumed one would have to handwave it away. It’s fairly common to have cultural or behavioral differences, but I am endlessly fascinated and excited by the way the species in RttS have to work around each other’s physical and biological differences!
Light_In_The_Fog
So glad this got answered! We were wondering a few pages ago about the color of heavy machinery. Are they orange because thats brightest to bug ferrets?
Jay Eaton
They’re human vehicles. Amber is a commonly used color in industrial settings for human visibility.
Light_In_The_Fog
Oh lol. that makes sense too lmao
40
Gotta love someone else asking exactly what I was wondering about. Fire, I was especially thinking about how screens would work. And just oh god imagine the entire like internet having to adapt to like not only merging with the other internets, if it did that, but also having to change the entire system of color everywhere.
Teod
So Talita is extra sensitive to framerete. But what are the numbers though? Is 60 too low or just enough?
Jay Eaton
She’s not more sensitive to frame rate than you, she has a higher flicker fusion threshold. So the flicker of a display refreshing at 60 Hz would be invisible to a human observer, but visible to avian and centaur observers. It can be very obnoxious and distracting while watching videos or scrolling on a device screen. I don’t have specific numbers written down for it yet.
Chrysalis
This is so cool!!! I’d never considered how display screen technology would have to change to work in infrared.
It seems lucky for Talita that she grew up among the species with the closest color vision range to centaurs – imagine growing up on a planet where people print things in ultraviolet.
Peter Jensen
Stains only visible in UV, while around humans … Oh no …
“What does blue mean?” “WHAT DOES BLUE MEAN???”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxf2MgYCOm0
creetur
“eeeeeEEEAAUUUUUGH”
Vinemaple
Oh, gad, Natural Habitat Shorts, of course lmao
Curona
I know Talita is using human-origin terminology here, but…if a centaur’s brain is located inside their body and not in their head, are **head** aches even a thing for them? Would the equivalent brain discomfort/pain instead feel to a centaur like what heartburn feels to a human? Come to think of it, a migraine for a centaur would be doubly debilitating with the brain being so close to their heart, lungs, and strongest limbs.
joeytwoeyes
They probably still get tension headaches from their eye and face muscles, like what talita is describing here.
Peter Jensen
Well, centaurs do have a smaller secondary brain in their head for immediate sensory processing. As the cause of the “headache” is a visual disturbance, it’s possible that it literally is the head brain that’s tired out by it. Come to think of it, their vision system is particularly focused on tracking small movements, and I can imagine that a visually flickering screen would be very taxing on the processing.
Paroxysmall
the avian perception of red reminds me of how it looks black when deep underwater
(and of something else i can’t link bc spoilers)
thegriffin88
Right, it never occurred to me that the refresh rate would affect non human species. I only learned about it when TVs got a refresh rate that pets could see and suddenly all these videos of pets watching TV began popping up. ….. I’m working on a fan comic……it shouldn’t come up in the actual story but I might include a few pages of infodumping because I can. My own urban fantasy comic is going to have dossiers on the species in that particular issue. (Stories aren’t linked, just the world stays the same)
the Inmara
Oh, this is so dang cool!
blythe
Cheev has a point though, cyan on white is atrocious
Rad Internet Stranger
Says the one with the cyan-on-white pfp
/jk
JoB
Website accessibility regulations don’t like white-on-cyan (my employers’ corporate identity), either :-3
Jay Eaton
For some perspective, it’s about as bad as yellow-on-white is for us. Dark blue on white is also kind of eye strain-y for avians, who perceive it as a fairly bright color (like orange or lime green).
Trees
I think if someone commits the travesty of writing cyan on white they are also required by universal law to set the font to Comic Sans.
godspeed
Yeah I hate it too.
Red Blacks are sort of eyestraining to me personally. I really loathe a certain red blue combo that makes the red blink for me. I think my brain is strained from the high contrast input it has to compute. I have a 99% colour vision I just have problems keeping some kind of teal apart.
Eyes and brains are weird.
I really love this question and answer. Tidbits like these make me squee with joy. I love colour science too.