RttS READER QUESTIONS

RttS Reader Questions 20

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.

RttS Reader Questions 20

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.

52 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 20

  1. This makes the anatomy lover in my head happy 🙂 I am also curious about what patterns and color combos look nice and/or bad for the different sophonts, and how their visual media differs from ours (like how ferret media is often far too crowded for anyone but ferrets)

  2. Gosh I love love love this info

    (I actually thought about similar stuff for my own works, but not as in depth. I know that human color vision is the exception and not the norm, with most animals seeing mostly blues and yellows (and unable to see red or green), with excellent night vision as well, and so this applies to pretty much each and every one of my non-human characters (whether they’re aliens, pokemon, or even demons)

    1. Light_In_The_Fog

      I’m really hoping that the aliens, pokemon, and demons all exist in the same world together

  3. Oh that’s utterly fascinating. I adore the amount of effort and love you stick into this comic, Jay, it’s fantastic.

  4. Ooh. And now I’m wondering which, if any of the other species have the “color wheel” wraparound like how humans see red/blue mixtures as pretty similar to actual violet. I mean, the ferret narrowband/lower overlap setup in particular seems like it wouldn’t loop like that perceptually, but the others might.

  5. Athelind Llewellyn Long

    Back in college, I did a summer internship at NASA working on multi-spectral imaging, and that’s when it really hit me that the “Color Wheel” posters that were in every physics classroom I’d seen were more biology than physics.

  6. I imagine I’m just missing something in my brain but I cant make sense of the brightest/darkest hue bits? What does this mean?

    1. if you display yellow and purple at the same objective brightness on the screen, humans will agree that yellow is the brighter color every time. Our eyes are more sensitive to it. The other species are calibrated differently because of different lighting conditions on their homeworlds. It’s very difficult for us to imagine cyan “looking dark” but it must be hypothetically possible for a different eye/brain structure.

  7. I love how almost the entirety of emo subculture is bad color theory for avians that’s just hilarious to me

  8. Very interesting! I cannot praise your dedication to details like this enough

  9. Great now I want to know which coours look brightest and darkest to my species. How would I even work that out though? Each indivindual eye-disk sees a different range of colours so all together that’s like 729 unique colours the brightest and darkest hues could be colours that don’t even exist like how there’s apperently no such thing as purple…
    A lot of this species is based on my experiences with the world. I struggle distinguishing green and yellow so the cones might be smallest toward the “middle” of the spectrum. Makes sense for a space-whale to not see visible light so well. So then green is darkest and IR is brightest? No UV would be brightest so that they instinctively navigate away from the more dangurous stars…
    Please someone smarter than me correct me.

    1. A space whale you say? I fee like infra red may be particularly beneficial. Your eyes would definitely need some layers to protect them from excess radiation, they might look very reflective from the outside.

  10. (Nerd baited) the sun ISN’T yellow! It’s white!

    But all human cultures seem to consistently depict it as yellow and we don’t seem to know why.

    1. I feel like we depict it as yellow instead of white because yellow is the brightest hue to us. Sun is bright, yellow is bright, ergo: sun is yellow. Also, during sunsets the sun makes things appear as orange/yellow, so the sun must also be yellow! ..right?

    2. My guess is the Rayleigh Scattering on Earth: If the sun (seen outside our atmosphere) is white, and even if having some blue taken out of that and smeared all over the sky isn’t enough to make for an actual yellow hue, the sun will seem yellow in contrast to the blue sky.

    3. Sol’s output is actually brightest in the green part of the spectrum, but there’s enough of everything else in the mix for it to look white.

    4. I get so pissed when people say the sun is yellow, like bro look at it 😭! It’s right there! 😭
      Honestly people’s general unawareness of color. Show an anglophone a color between blue and green and they’ll come up with about 30 names for it and everyone’s internal definitions of those colors are different things. Oh and don’t get me STARTED on PINK!

      1. Humanity’s favorite pastime is creating categories and then arguing over them, now and forever

    5. It’s a G-class star, which have a chromaticity typically described as yellow or yellowish-white. Stars emit a wide band of radiation but we classify them in part from the hue tint we perceive. A warm light and a cool light are both white, but perceptually one is more orange and one is more blue.

  11. “what do you mean, this “shadow” characters has red bits?”

    1. The avian redesign of Shadow the Hedgehog gives him green stripes

      1. I feel like the Tiiliit would hate that! :O

        1. Probably not if it’s a mucky forest green suitably distinct from the Proper and Beautiful royal hues. After all, that character is based on an Earth animal, why wouldn’t an Earth animal be Earth plant colors?

  12. really enjoy these nerdbait ones <3

  13. 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!

  14. 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?

    1. They’re human vehicles. Amber is a commonly used color in industrial settings for human visibility.

      1. Light_In_The_Fog

        Oh lol. that makes sense too lmao

  15. 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.

  16. So Talita is extra sensitive to framerete. But what are the numbers though? Is 60 too low or just enough?

    1. 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.

      1. Makes me wonder what animation looks like to her.
        Like if each example in this video
        https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZH6he7EWDHU
        looks like what the above one looks to us.

        Actually, I’d like to ask if talita even gets the appeal of 2d animation, what with how traditional animation has been tailor made ever since its inception through all manner of tricks and techniques to look fluid to the human eye, but maybe it just looks weird to a centaurs eye?

  17. 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.

  18. 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

    1. “eeeeeEEEAAUUUUUGH”

    2. Oh, gad, Natural Habitat Shorts, of course lmao

  19. 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.

    1. They probably still get tension headaches from their eye and face muscles, like what talita is describing here.

    2. 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.

    3. the brain is not what hurts in a human headache either.

    4. Fun fact, there are no sensory nerves in your brain! You could poke it with a stick and not feel a thing (…if you already had a hole in your skull, which you probably *would* feel). Most headaches are caused by the muscles of the head, eyes, face, and neck.

      So if focusing on a flickering screen stresses Talita’s eyes, it makes sense that would manifest as a headache for her!

  20. 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)

  21. 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)

  22. Oh, this is so dang cool!

  23. Cheev has a point though, cyan on white is atrocious

    1. Rad Internet Stranger

      Says the one with the cyan-on-white pfp
      /jk

      1. Website accessibility regulations don’t like white-on-cyan (my employers’ corporate identity), either :-3

    2. 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).

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. Yeah, anyone who puts cyan on white is clearly a monster… same with dark red on black.

      My personal preference is teal on black… or a slightly darker hunter green* on black if it’s very late and I’m unable to stop reading the latest book addiction.

      * Specifically #00504a, by the time I’ve slipped down to that shade, I know I need to stop for the night… but the call of ‘just one more paragraph’ which becomes ‘one more page’, then ‘one more chapter’, is real.

    6. Yeah! Who *does* that?? That’s a bad human!

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