In 2003 the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson suddenly became very, very famous. In the misty quiet of his Weather Project, the fourth commission in Tate Modern’s Unilever Series, people lay on the floor of the vast Turbine Hall, gazing at themselves in a mirrored ceiling, bathed in the light of a huge artificial sun. It felt as if the apocalypse had occurred and turned out not to be so bad after all.

With 2.2 million visitors, the Weather Project was one of the most popular works of installation art in recent memory. Tomorrow, Your Uncertainty of Colour Matching Experiment, Eliasson’s first UK show since the Weather Project, opens at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. But when you’ve created the sun, isn’t anything else going to be an anticlimax?

“I don’t think so,” Eliasson muses. “You could say the Weather Project was about perception and to what degree we are capable of evaluating the nature of our experience. So in that way the show at Ikon is about the same thing.”

The similarity is not immediately obvious. Your Uncertainty of Colour Matching Experiment comprises three smallish interlocking spaces and there is definitely no lying about. The first room contains a previously exhibited work, Colour Spectrum Series (2005). Forty-eight hand-produced prints represent the electromagnetic spectrum from black, all the way through every colour to black again. “We’ve tried to make a rainbow,” Eliasson says. At first, it seems just like a line of block-coloured prints but, as you peer closer, you realise that each follows a subtle gradation leading to the next print. Every plate is mixed by hand. “Conceptually it’s an introduction to the exhibition,” Nigel Prince, the show’s curator, explains. “What you understand as red isn’t a fixed red. It reveals colour as fluid, as a continuum — it challenges preconceptions of what colour is.”

Moving into the second space, you find the focus of the show. A pair of tables with what look like microscopes attached to laptops, sitting in a dimly lit room painted a nondescript grey. Looking through one eyepiece, you see a small yellow circle. One half is a fixed shade of yellow, the other moves, by the turning of a small dial, within the shading spectrum of the same colour. Simple instructions ask you to turn the dial until both halves of the circle look exactly the same. The other apparatus does the same with blue tones. Once you’ve done both, you fill in a form with information about your age, sex and so on, and proceed into the final room. And here, all becomes clear.

Two video projectors, updated every 30 seconds by a wireless connection to the laptops in the other room, project a grid of little split-screen circles on to the wall: the results of every experiment conducted so far. Almost every one is different, some wildly so.

“We take for granted that people fundamentally perceive the same,” Eliasson explains. “But if we take things for granted which are not, we are short of one important tool among many in our desire to navigate our sense of identity.” He pauses and smiles. “I’m not saying colour perception is the essential tool to sort out your life. It’s more about being aware that some things we take as based on truth are in fact products of culture and commerce.” The idea that the business community conspires to convince the human race that blue jeans are blue even if they look a bit purple to some of us strikes me as a bit far-fetched, but I get the idea. And the variation is truly astonishing.

Boris Oicherman, a scientist from the University of Leeds with whom Eliasson has collaborated on the show, thinks nothing like this has been done before. “It’s almost an experiment in doing an experiment,” he says. “Experiments are done in a laboratory. The advantage to this is that it is very controlled. The disadvantage is that you can only have very limited numbers.” The Ikon Gallery has around 100,000 visitors every year. Oicherman hopes to find out, by comparing the frequency of the numbers assigned to each shade of yellow or blue, how much colour vision varies and how much factors such as age or sex affect the ability to perceive it. It’s one of those rare examples of art actually, really, meaning something.

Your Uncertainty of Colour Matching Experiment is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, from tomorrow to September 17 (www.ikon-gallery.co.uk; 0121-248 0708)