A five-primary Maxwellian-view display for independent control of melanopsin, rhodopsin, and three-cone opsins on a fine spatial scale

Independent spatiotemporal control of the stimulation of the five photoreceptor classes requires a display with as many primary lights to probe their isolated spatial and temporal responses. No such system exists with suitable performance properties. We present a system to construct a five-primary display from commercially available three-primary digital light processing projectors. It optimizes the set of five primary lights required to maximize the achievable contrast of a single photoreceptor class in a silent substitution protocol, including where the background chromaticity is first specified. From these chosen five primaries, we describe a method to convert complex three-primary (RGB) images to five-primary representations with complete specification of the photoreceptor excitations at each pixel. Key to enabling this multiple display system with a single HDMI connection is a novel control protocol implemented in a deterministic field-programmable gate array controller that splits the data into five video streams to allow nearly synchronous presentation of primary image data through multiple displays. Each pixel is controlled over 9.5 bits for each primary over a single frame for measurement of threshold-level vision. In addition to a large contrast gamut, the Maxwellian view offers high retinal illumination to support the investigation of five opsin-based responses to complex spatiotemporal images with a truly silent substitution protocol, while avoiding the confounding effects of uncontrolled photoreceptor excitations as occurs in four-primary systems. The customizable primaries facilitate this display translation to species with different photoreceptor spectral responses, and the optics are designed for integration into microscopes for use as a stimulus generator in physiological experiments.