Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain

wired.com

32 pointsGarbage27 comments

> If talking about music is, as someone once said, like dancing about architecture, then talking about color is like doing a trapeze act in zero-g on a space station.

OK, but you could just show some screen-caps to illustrate what you are talking about.

Who writes a whole article about colors and how they are used to evoke emotions, yet does not include any pictures at all?

It seems to be about some mystical future HDR promise for computer animation. Evidently, current hardware is incapable of representing what is described in the article correctly. ;)

I read the article. I did a web search. I still don't know what "hyper-colors" are.

Did Pixar hack all of our brains and remove the term from the lexicon, leaving no audit trail?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

That is not what the article is about though.

This is exactly where the article ends:

So what if, Glynn proposes, a scene in a movie added, subtly, light in a very specific wavelength of green? Then just kept ramping up, more and more green—and, at a key moment, the screen dropped all the green out at once. The movie would induce the complementary color as an afterimage. You'd imagine you were seeing a specific red, not projected on the screen but as a neurophysiological response to stimulus. And if you pick the precise wavelength, “you could actually cause someone to perceive a color that they could never otherwise see. Like, there's no natural way for you to have the perception of that color.”

That color wouldn't be onscreen. It wouldn't be anything a projector could cast or a computer could generate. It'd be a function of pure cognition, different for every viewer, existing only in the mind, then fading to nothingness. Which is true for all colors anyway, when you think about it.

The article is rather garbled, but as I understand it he is talking about a hypothetical effect, not something Pixar actually uses.

There are no antimemetic colors.

"Hyper colors" to "hack my brain"? And it was like 14 paragraphs in until they actually started talking about anything technical. Always regret clicking Wired articles nowadays, they're literally just making up terms now for click bait purposes.

That’s a lot of text and very little images for an article about color. I’m a simple mind, I hoped for pictures

So, the takeaways I got, despite Pixar praise and the usual Wired hype:

- Pixar employs precise control of a movie's colour model to convey emotion. Usually, this consists of a specific palette of hues and shifts in brightness and saturation. (Not very surprising)

- This colour control is starting to hit technical and physical boundaries: Commercial projectors cannot represent all colours as accurate as Pixar's artists would like.

- Two approaches how this might be solved in the future are: Brighter projectors (I think?) and making clever use of afterimages and the biology of human color perception: They slowly ramp up intensity of a particular colour, matching the speed which colour receptors desensitize to that colour. Then they quickly ramp down the colour intensity and have viewers experience an intense afterimage of the complementary colour, possibly more saturated than the projector would be able to generate by conventional means.

Brighter projectors would certainly help, but only if they can expand contrast ratios.

I haven't read about projectors using the perceptual tricks you described: it seems like POV-based approaches would have a distracting strobe effect?

Just like with CMYK prints, if you want to render something "out of gamut" (colors that aren't representable with the display), you need a different display.

This is typically done in print by adding spot colors to the color separations. Similarly, displays that add color emitters that aren't just blue, red, and green can render beyond sRGB. I believe some "quantum dot" displays have yellow and pink emitters, for example.

Hyper colors?

Not a huge fan of the terminology. Although I feel the same about hyper cubes.

Would this include magenta? The example images just seem like fluorescents and such. As a computer graphics person, I’m a little disoriented by the article honestly. It feels more like a Disney / Pixar puff piece than a technical article.

Yeah. I feel like there's meaningful stuff in reality here, but this piece (and the title) isn't capturing it properly.

All I got is that Pixar does color mastering on a ridiculously high dynamic range projector with super high purity primaries.

I don't understand how this is hacking, and I don't understand how this is cheating.

What I would like to know is how close modern top of the line OLED HDR setups approach the dynamic range of Pixar's setup. I would like to know how necessary the ultra-pure primaries are. I would like to know how necessary the 6 lasers are.

The term hyper-color does not even appear in the article. Pixar used color to "hack your brain" the same way Shakespeare uses language to hack your brain - i.e. they use it artistically to invoke emotion. That in itself is interesting enough, but Wired try to make it sound more weird than it is. Some screen-caps with comments from the artists would be much more interesting than a color theory 101 which is embedded in the article.

I found this article confusing too. Being on a tech news site I expected it to eventually get to something concrete, perhaps producing chimeric colors [1] for an impactful moment -- something to justify the "hack your brain" line.

Instead the article just seems to say that color design for animation is a bit different.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

Sorry, but Wired is garbage and has been for quite some time. Its content is antithetical, in my view, to what this community seeks in terms of thoughtfulness, curiosity, and substance.

Edit: Just noticing the poster’s username…how apropos!

Is the dark dark to bright bright the same trick iPhones use to show whiter than white highlights in photos? There was an article about this on HN a while back, can’t seem to find it now.

It's something else; here's the article you were looking for: https://prolost.com/blog/edr

Did it get worth reading after the halfway mark, when I gave up wading through all the waffle?

No. It doesn't even explain what "hyper-color" is.

Using illusory afterimages to give a perception of non-natural color is a cool idea, but I'm not sure that it'll be a part of the future as far as Pixar is concerned. Pixar must care immensely about precisely controlling the viewing experience. Afterimages look different depending on where you look, and can be blurry. Unless we can start to intervene in our visual cortex, how could we ever achieve precise control over afterimages?

No way I'm reading all that text about filmography without a single image to get the point across, wired

hah, let pixar hack my brain... if you/your company can also make those kind of animations then you/your company are/is allowed to hack my brain!

why do I say something like this? because if you think about the advertisements trying to hack my brain, this one looks so innocent... please don't hesitate to analyse those !

Writing an article about colors without actually including any is a wasted opportunity.

But why? Ain't Teal & Orange all the colors we ever need?

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