> color is a surprisingly hard and deep subject

Oh yeah. I was (hmm, am) hoping to dig out some limited cluster of concepts that gells as "oh, that's fun, and I'd very not have thought you could teach that, or that way". Eg xkcd color name regions in a voxelized color space as "learn color names" K-1 worksheet. Trying for a "light"(spectra) vs "color"(human perception) distinction, limiting scope on perception to early primary color topics.

Science education rarely does deep, integrated, or usable, so it's rather an open question what might be possible. And without a vision of that, there's little incentive for funding or exploring other than incremental improvement.

Even aside from creation pragmatics. "A big onboarding welcome to all our new science textbook author staff! Worry not that you are fresh liberal arts graduates, with no science background at all, for we've A Scientist on call!"(paraphrased)

> a simple opponent-process color space

Ah, neat. That could be fun.

Given my focus on spectra, I was also tempted by IGPGTG's "build on Gaussian spectra", but pruned.

> have students design their own color space!

Oh, there's an intriguing idea. I'd though as far as "if I can't find a color space without misleading large artifacts, I'll have to offer a diverse swappable several, if students are to have any hope of distinguishing data from noise". But a direct manipulation "create your own color space"... hmmm. Perhaps evaluated with visual metrics? Like gradients for linearity. Or mixing for Euclidean-ness and hue order - reorder a hue circle, and get weirdness in the in-betweens? Neat approach - not "this is just how it is" but "hands on, you'll find this a sweet spot". Hmm, if say, "Pink is the most important color! So its variants should be the focus of my space!"... what might that look like? A "pink-set" of color names? Eg, not "green" but "anti-magenta"? Not "white" but "palest pink"? :) I so miss pre-covid brainstorming like this at MIT. :/

> a couple of neat presentations recently that combine the science of perception and color spaces along with good design sensibilities to make interfaces that are demonstrably better for artists

Very neat. If a link surfaces, I'd be interested. There's some work on simulating pigment spectra and interaction for "physically realistic" painting, and I wondered at their UI. And if a MVP web app with such, might serve as hands-on antidote to the "subtractive rules are peers to additive" misconception.

> take a photograph of it set inside a scene that we physically built

I wondered how controlled lighting (filter gell on box, discrete LEDs, and tablets getting the narrow spectra of quantum-dot displays) might be leveraged. Eg, "sketch what you think this page/thing/scene will look like if lit like X, then try it and describe it, and take a picture"?

And sketched, sort of a point renderer - a block ui for playing with spectra. Eg, a Sun block, realistically pictured with red-tinted rim on white, with a spectra and white color", passed though atmosphere block set at angle X, with this transmittance/reflectance/florescence strip, yielding this spectra and color, lighting this point on a multispectral image of fruit, with/yielding ditto. Seen by this camera to get rgb, shown by this display to get this spectra. Banana vs banana pixel. Filters, bounced sources, etc. And then perhaps challenges of "assemble blocks to get a spectra like this". Or to light this multispectral MacBeth or scene to match this snapshot. Or bantering, "your freehand or musically-keyboarded spectra looks like this strawberry icecream with blue M&Ms". A hands-on way to address the many misconceptions around lighting and color.

And then there's video shaders, filtering or fragmenting by color space and names, for interacting with color in the environment. And... the minor challenge of finding a coherent MV"P" in all of this. :)