Archive for the 'ITP' Category

I made a quick draft of the vertical bars idea in Processing and concluded that the illusion is not extreme enough to create different patterns. The concept works, but the illusion is very subtle and I unfortunately don’t think my idea will work.

I have been reading The Intelligent Eye, another book by R.L. Gregory which focuses on stereoscopic vision and find the topic very interesting. Two new ideas came out of this:

1. Now that 3D TVs have been announced by all the major manufacturers, the next step is to bring the ability to create 3D content to the everyday person. I thought of building a 2-camera rig which would allow the creation of stereoscopic content. I could open-source the whole process and create a step-by-step tutorial online, so that anyone who is interested can build his own rig.
2. In the book, Gregory mentions an anaglyph drawing machine which works by drawing a red and blue stroke simultaneously on the page as you move your stylus. The further apart the lines are, the closer the shape appears to the viewer (when wearing anaglyph filter glasses). His machine was not explained in detail, but it appeared to set depth based on the vertical position of the stylus. I am thinking of building my own stereoscopic drawing machine, which would use a mechanism similar to that of a bicycle brake to set how close the red and blue strokes are to each other. I am thinking something along the lines of Rhonda, but as a physical device instead of software.

I want to explore optical illusions made through persistence of vision.

I worked on an ARG a few years ago where we tried to come up with visual puzzles for the players and became very interested in the subject matter. I still get together with some of the people I worked with and discuss different visual puzzle ideas that we find interesting. This research led me to Eye and Brain, a book on the psychology of vision by R.L. Gregory, to better understand how our perception works.

My idea is to build a device that reveals recognizable images or messages by combining mechanical motion and human vision. I think this would be very compelling because it is not just a machine that works standalone, but a system that requires a human to function.

I have been exploring an illusion consisting of alternating black and white vertical bars. The bars scroll from right to left for a while and stop abruptly. For the next few seconds, our eyes are still “following” this motion, so the bars appear to be moving from left to right (in the opposite direction). Instead of stopping the entire length of the bars, my idea is to only stop some horizontal sections of the set of bars and keep the rest going, so that more complex shapes get created. By carefully picking which sections stop and which keep scrolling, I would try to create simple recognizable shapes like letters.

I am not sure this idea would work as the illusion might not occur if there is still motion happening, since our eyes will still have a point of reference to follow. My next step is to create a quick Processing sketch to see if this would work or not.

Inspiration

Bit.Code by Julius Popp (via Adi Marom)

X by Y by Daniel Rozin