How Pixar uses hyper-colors to hack your brain

PLUS: More of WIRED's best longreads from this week.

View this email in your browser  |  Manage newsletter subscriptions  05.02.21 Color—the stuff, the red-green-blue of the world—is a lot of things all at once. It's the rain of uncountable photons of energy, bouncing off of and through everything around you. It's electromagnetic waves. It's the chemistry of paints and dyes. And it's those things interwoven and pinging into sensors in your eyeballs and transducing into the mysterious electrical signals in your brain that make a world in your mind. Oh, and color is also the way that Pixar manipulates your feelings with each new billion-dollar, Oscar-winning movie, turning virtual light inside a computer into very real, very bright, laser-guided light on a screen. For my new book Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern—excerpted this week on Backchannel—I went inside Pixar's prismatic digital workshop to learn how the animators there teach infinitesimal flecks of light to evoke every color of the emotional rainbow. Adam Rogers | Senior Correspondent, WIRED   How Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain BY ADAM ROGERS | 13-MINUTE READ The animation studio's artists are masters at tweaking light and color to trigger deep emotional responses. Coming soon: effects you'll only see inside your head.   How Porn's Racist Metadata Hurts Adult Performers of Color BY NOELLE PERDUE | 6-MINUTE READ Despite the massive innovations tech has brought to the industry, nonwhite creators remain confined to a rigid, outdated classification system.   Remember When You Could See Inside a Gaming Console? BY CECILIA D'ANASTASIO | 5-MINUTE READ Translucent devices like the Game Boy Color made a tacit promise to players: Everything the light touches is yours. But the future seems to be a black box.   Vaccine Registries Are Good, Vaccine Apps Are Invasive BY ALBERT FOX CAHN AND MAHIMA ARYA | 4-MINUTE READ One is tried and true and essential to reopening schools. The other acts as an invasive bouncer that could block many communities out of essential spaces.   Help! Should I Be More Ambitious? BY MEGAN GREENWELL | 4-MINUTE READ How to figure out if it's time for a new job, according to Megan.   The Plane Paradox: More Automation Should Mean More Training BY SHEM MALMQUIST AND ROGER RAPOPORT | 5-MINUTE READ Today's highly automated planes create surprises pilots aren't familiar with. The humans in the cockpit need to be better prepared for the machine's quirks. GET WIRED Stare the future right in the eye. Get 1 year of unlimited access to WIRED for less than $2 per month. Plus, get a free tote. Subscribe now.         This e-mail was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book.   View our Privacy Policy Unsubscribe or manage your newsletter subscriptions   Copyright © Condé Nast 2021. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.