Brian Carter

Usually I wouldn’t post an optical illusion because, why bother, they’re all over the internet. But this one…this one I like.

Here’s what I like about it — the sense of the uncanny. Something that is turning one way seems to without changing direction turn the other way. What seems to be a concave shape is suddenly convex and pointing out at us. This is the sort of non-Euclidian geometry that Lovecraft wrote about. If only we didn’t know it was an illusion.

Well, I have to confess that I’ve been in love with radiolab for a while now. I caught it one Friday night when I was late coming home from work, it was the sleep episode, I subscribed to the podcast immediately.

For those of you who don’t know what radiolab is, it’s a documentary radio show that usually (but not always) explores scientific concepts. It’s like This American Life, only instead of interesting people, it’s interesting phenomena. Also, host Jad Abumrod goes nuts with ProTools to make it really come alive.

That’s what I find so interesting, how clear they make complex aural situations. They will seamlessly “cut” from an interview Robert did in the field to Jad and Robert talking in the studio…and you can track it. It’s not just comprehensible, it’s immediately obvious. They can insert quick cutaways to different locations and even without obvious clues (background noise) it’s not confusing at all.

I really enjoy soundscapes in music and apparently in documentaries too.

I wrote the following as a metafilter comment about the horror photography Joshua Hoffine.

I think it was Picasso who said “art is the lie, which tells the truth” These pictures are the truth that sounds like lies. See that’s the thing about art. There’s lossy compression involved. That’s where the skill of the artist comes in, dealing with that lossy compression.

Photos don’t have sounds or movement, or smells. Most of our senses are telling our brain the same message: nothing has changed from a moment ago when we read that dinosaur thread. Our vision is meekly saying “oh…it seems a silhouette of a girl might be treading into a basement where a goblin faced man is under the stairs. Also, you have a new IM”

In one of the Hoffine photos, a wolf is attacking a poor naked girl…but wait! There’s a man’s arm! Oh, I guess he’s a werewolf. Right. Ho-Hum.

Why is this boring? This should be triggering all of our fear reflexes! A young girl about to be eaten by an animal. And not a normal animal but an animal that isn’t like any animal we have experienced!

The same reason watching a video of a roller coaster from the ground is boring. Sure you can empathize about how scared the riders (or naked girl) might be, but a large part of feeling fear is the adreniline boost that occurs when you cannot predict your surroundings. Our empathy with regards to fear is limited because fear can throw several switches in our brain that we cannot.

So, how do you, as an artist, do it? How do you deal with the limited sensory compression in a photograph. How do you unnerve people when you are handicapped by only being able to use a fraction of one sense? When no matter what is in that image you will have at least 4 senses working against your prediction of danger?

J.K Potter deals with the fact that she can’t break the rules of your surroundings by breaking the rules that she can. Compare Hoffine’s half-human/half-animal with this one by J.K. Potter.

Potter’s was probably done with an enlarger and traditional retouching tools. If you look (not even too) closely at the top blending line, it seems to be a simple fade. I feel like the light might be inconsistent between the two images that are blended and it’s a duotone photo — something that you would only see if you were a strange form of color blind. Altogether, it’s much less realistic than the Hoffine wolf photo, which is: in color, has realistic effects, not much obvious retouching. Yet I, and I imagine others, would find the Potter photo much creepier.

I think it’s because of the way nature and her lack of options forced her hand. If you asked a creative person to design a guy with a fish head, the results would probably look cartoony. necks would morph into other necks. There would be clear divisions at the edges of body parts you could name, or a dispertion of fishyness over the form of a human. But because Potter couldn’t really distort the form of either one, she had to put it in an unconventional place, with impossible physiology.

In essense, she’s saying “keep your office smells and sounds, but I’ll break the laws of nature in mine and that will make you feel threatened.”

Reality Mining

Reality mining, he says, “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”

To me, until it’s doing this, a Personal Digital Assistant is simply a Personal Data Container.

In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

…and remind you to ask them that question you put in earlier.

For now, though, Pentland is excited about the potential of reality mining to simplify people’s lives. “All of the devices that we have are completely ignorant of the things that matter most,” he says. “They may know all sorts of stuff about Web pages and phone numbers. But at the end of the day, we live to interact with other people. Now, with reality mining, you can see how that happens … it’s an interesting God’s-eye view.”

This is what’s coming, and I am so excited for it.

So I was browsing photographer/retoucher Glenn Feron’s site and I came across this one photo with a before/after mouseover.

One of the things he did on this photo was replace the man’s left eye. Look into that eye while you switch between the before and after. Even though the man is friendly looking, that switch is kind of creepy.

What if this was done in a movie. Like maybe if an actor would play his part, and then another actor would go stand in the same places and then they would position track the second actor’s eyes on top of the first and morph between them from time to time. Slowly morph, no breakdancing eyes or anything. Maybe the morph could take place during an expression change.

It’s impossible to say without seeing it done, but I feel like it would be quite disturbing in a way one might be hard pressed to pin down. Similar to some of the shots in theBlack Hole Sun video.

I feel like this article on low spatial frequency analysis by Matt Queen might be very relevant to my fovea vs. peripheral thoughts of late. This is actually what got me started on that idea, but I forgot about it. Well, technically this Gamasutra article (login required, Bugmenot recommended) is the first one that got me started on high spatial frequency vs. low spatial frequency. I think I shall google some more…

Can I tell you a secret? What I love about interfaces is how it feels to use them.
Read more…

Software I would like to see made:

• A location aware To-Do list. On my laptop, on my phone. Wherever. But you know what network I’m connected to, therefore you know where I am.
• A To-Do sidebar. When I click on a task, it asks me what files I need for that task. I choose them. It opens them. I click when I’m done with the task. More on this series later.

So, my first post so long ago was on the fovea, even if I didn’t refer to it as that. I ended it with “let’s see what else we can come up with!”. And so, just recently I did.It’s a hypothesis of the vaguest sort, and I expected to be dismissed or disproved by everybody I discussed it with…but my visual perception professor didn’t dismiss it, nor has anybody else. Still, I offer it up with this caveat: I might be wrong.I was reading my VisPerception course packet and they went over all of the well-known optical illusions. As I was experiencing them, I was asking myself what everybody does when viewing illusions: “How can I be experiencing something so wrong?” It is pretty rare we get confronted with just how easily our perceptions are fooled.I tried looking at this illusion with the knowledge of the fovea: that everything we see is a tiny piece of sharpness in the center of a blur and I realized something.We don’t see it like that. We see it like this.And that makes all the difference.The other line is actually just a rough approximation of the line that’s actually there. We can’t see them both at the same time. And while our eyes saccade from one to the other, our peripheral brain is constastly swapping out what it thinks about the other…based on a rough guess of a blurry image.A hopfully clear description of the entire process:We look at one end of one of the lines, the left end of the top line like in my fovea simulation. The blurry ends we have of the other line is much further away from the only landmarks we have, the diagonal lines. Our brain tags it as “a longer line”. If we then move our eyes over to an end of the lower line, we’ll notice that the inverse is true: the blurry line is “shorter”. Our brain is confident because it got many rounds of confirmation.Try this. Look between the two horizontal lines so that all the edges are in your peripheral. You won’t be as fooled.Like I said, the fact that my explanation seems “simple” and “easy” compared to the explanation in the Visual Perception course book (which said that the diagonal lines became depth cues and we viewed it with 3d and perspective in mind.) makes me feel like a bit of a crackpot. Still, I think looking at the world with the knowledge you have a fovea is a real eye-opener.That’s not a pun because it’s used literally.

People say “computers are a tool.”. You hear that all the time, but I don’t think that’s quite true. Computer Software is more like an annoying co-worker.

(When I say “tool” here, I refer to the first definition: “a device or implement, esp. one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function”, not the open ended second one: “a thing used in an occupation or pursuit”.)

Really, tools of this sort are just things we attach to our arms to have a different ending — like different bits on screwdrivers. I swing my fist, something breaks, I swing my hammer, something breaks. 1:1 ratio. I move my wrist a certain way and the pencil tip attached makes a line that directly corresponds to my movement.

Studies (that I am too lazy to look up and source) say that when people use tools, their body image extends to include the tool. Makes sense. I mean, it’s your arm, just making different marks on the paper. As long as youre holding the pencil or pen or brush or whatever, it is consistent that your movements will make a mark when your new bit at the end touches the paper. If we can be fooled into thinking a detached plastic hand is ours just because the pattern we feel and the pattern we see matches up, then we have even more reason to believe a pen or a pencil is “us”.
See the hand experiment details.

None of this sounds like software.
Computers are really like co-workers. It does things on its own. It is has certain requirements, it can misunderstand you, sometimes it’s sick and doesn’t come through with the work you need it to do, sometimes it barges in to tell you things you don’t care about while you’re deep in the flow zone. Sometimes it’s lazy, sometimes it botches what you are trying to do.

And all you can do to communicate with it, is point and grunt at the potentially obscure or mismarked choices it gives you.

Jeff Hawkins said about developing Graffitti that people would rather learn a new and consistent way to write that works than suffer through bad handwriting recognition. He’s right. They’d rather use a tool than a translator. People would rather do it themselves. I don’t know about you, but that means something’s wrong with what we’ve been doing with computers. All we can get them to do is act like tools so maybe we should either go the tool route, or concentrate more on making them better co-workers.

I’m more excited for the latter.