VSS Demo Night
8th Annual VSS Dinner and Demo Night
Monday, May 10, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Buffet Dinner 7:00 – 9:00 pm, Vista Ballroom, Vista Terrace and Sunset Deck
Demos 7:30 – 10:00 pm, Royal 4-5 Ballroom and Acacia Meeting Rooms
Please join us Monday evening for the 8th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS
members, delectable food, and social interaction.
The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year,
Arthur Shapiro, Peter Tse, and Alan Gilchrist are co-curators for Demo Night.
A buffet dinner will be held on the Sunset Terrace and Vista Deck overlooking the Naples Grande main pool. Demos will be located upstairs on the ballroom level in the Royal 4-5 Ballroom and Acacia Meeting Rooms.
Demo Night is free for all registered VSS attendees. Meal tickets are not required, but you must wear your VSS badge for entry to the Dinner Buffet. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome to attend the demos, but must purchase a ticket for dinner. You can register your guests at any time during the meeting at the VSS Registration Desk located in the Royal Ballroom foyer. At
7:00 pm Monday, a desk will also be set up at the entrance to the BBQ in the Vista Ballroom.
Guest prices
Adults: $25
Youth (6-12 years old): $10
Children under 6: free
The Ambiguous Corner Cube and Friends
Kenneth Brecher (Boston University)
Several three-dimensional visually ambiguous objects
that are bi-stable, tri-stable (and possibly more) will be
displayed. The missing corner cube in particular probes
interesting questions about the number of possible visual
interpretations of such objects and their relative strength.
The Not-So Rotating Snakes
Christopher Cantor, Humza Tahir (University of California,
Berkeley)
This illusion is an extension of our poster: we will show
how certain optical manipulations kill the rotating snakes
illusion.
Fun with stick shadow motion
Gideon Paul Caplovitz (Princeton University), Marian E. Berryhill
(University of Pennsylvania)
Shadows of objects moving in 3D that are projected on a
2D surface move in ambiguous ways and have been used
to provide insight into how our brains construct motion
percepts. Here we re-create a simplified and interactive
version of the original ‘stick shadow motion’ apparatus
(Metzger 1934).
Tangible display systems: bringing virtual
objects into the real world
Jim Ferwerda (Rochester Institute of Technology)
We are developing tangible display systems that allow
people to interact with virtual surfaces as naturally as they
can with real ones. We integrate accelerometers and webcams
in laptops and cell phones with 3D surface models
and computer graphics rendering, to create images of
glossy textured surfaces that change realistically as the user
manipulates the display.
Sharon Gershoni Photographs: Aesthetic
Studies in Visual Perception
Sharon Gershoni, Shaul Hochstein (Neurobiology Department,
Hebrew University)
I am an artist and a scientist. Since 2000 I have been pursuing
graduate studies in visual perception in Japan, as well
as being an artist in residence at visual perception labs.
There I started developing the visual sciences-art connection,
which I currently continue at the ICNC and Bezalel
Art Academy. The photographs are the product of this
interdisciplinary path.
Waves of Lights, Magic Flowers and
Unchained Dots illusions
Simone Gori (Department of General Psychology, University of
Padua), D. Alan Stubbs (University of Maine)
We will present three new motion illusions. Wave of Lights
and Magic Flowers present surprising size and brightness
variations due to observer motion, while the Unchained
Dots Illusion is characterized by the misperception of dot
trajectory.
Free the Ring!: Striking Color Spreading
Induced Transparency
Abigail Huang, Alice Hon and Eric Altschuler (New Jersey Medical
School)
We read/saw that vertical yellow bars can appear to
spread geometrically faithfully through a black horizontal
bar. Here we show that in a stereopsis display this effect
can give striking transparency—e.g., a white ring inside a
black pyramid.
Coming face to face with 2-faced faces
Melinda S. Jensen and Kyle E. Mathewson (University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign)
In this demo, we present pairs of identical ambiguous
figures. Even with intentional effort, observers typically
cannot hold opposing interpretations of the two figures.
However, with a simple and powerful technique, observers
can see the alternative interpretations side by side.
The Jaggy Diamonds Illusion
Qian Kun and Takahiro Kawabe (Kyushu University)
We report a new illusion where the edges of diamonds
placed at the intersections of crossing grids are perceived to
be jaggy (the jaggy diamonds illusion). Luminance contrast
among diamonds, grids, and background is a strong determinant
for this illusion.
Stretching out in the tub
Lydia Maniatis (American University)
A large image of a bathtub appears to change shape as the
viewpoint changes.
Smoothness Aftereffect
Emmanuel Guzman Martinez, Marcia Grabowecky, Laura
Ortega-Torres, and Satoru Suzuki (Northwestern University)
Adaptation to a grainy, randomly black and white flicker
produces an apparently smoother region on a subsequent
gray display. This percept can appear in rivalry with the
afterimage of the adaptor when a proportion of white-black
pixels differs.
Steerable Spirals
Peter B. Meilstrup and Michael N. Shadlen (University of Washington)
When local features are put in conflict with global trajectories,
the result can depend on long range competition
between features. In our demo viewers interactively adjust
the spacing of an array of identical elements resulting in
different perceived global directions.
The Wellcome Trust Illusion
Michael Morgan (Max-Planck Institute of Neurology, Koeln,
Germany)
A page of the Wellcome Trust Grant Application form has
a series of vertically aligned text boxes that are distorted in
shape by surrounding text.
Variations on the hollow mask illusion
Thomas V. Papathomas and Manish Singh (Rutgers University)
In the hollow-mask illusion, a rotating hollow mask is perceived
as a convex face rotating in the opposite direction.
Variations of the hollow mask (featureless mask; randomtextured;
realistically painted; “smoking” a cigarette) illustrate
how various manipulations affect the illusion.
Positive Afterimage
Maryam Vaziri Pashkam (Harvard University), Daw-An Wu (California
Institute of Technology)
A powerful flash will burn a long-lasting positive afterimage
on your retina that you can experiment on. Make the
whole room tilt, make an object float in the air, or take a
standstill picture of your friend’s funny gesture with your
eyes.
Exploring YOUR Phantom Limb: Paresthesias
Elicited by Three Webcam Video
Demonstrations
David Peterzell (University of California, San Diego and San
Diego State University)
Three webcam-based procedures were designed in hopes
of facilitating treatment of phantom limb pain in amputees
(based on modifications to theories of VS Ramachandran),
but cause unusual sensations (paresthesias and sense of
limb movement) in many ‘’normal’’ observers.
Star Trek (lightness from depth) illusion
Yury Petrov and Jiehui Qian (Northeastern University)
We will demonstrate how lightness and contrast of objects
can be modulated up to 50%, when the objects appear to
move in depth. Surprisingly, radial optic flow produces a
much stronger illusion than binocular disparity.
Real-Time Avatar Animation in Virtual
Reality
Matthias Pusch and Michael Schaletzki (WorldViz)
Live animation of an avatar in virtual reality through
natural body movements via simple-to-use WorldViz PPT
motion capture. This next generation real-time technology
empowers researchers to inject living human beings into
virtual worlds and give them the ability to engage in interactions,
which opens new avenues for avatar-based visual
perception and spatial cognition experiments.
Stroboscopic training for an Athletic Task
Alan Reichow and Herb Yoo (Nike, Inc.), Stephen Mitroff (Duke
University), Graham Erickson (Pacific University)
A new product called Nike Strobe uses stroboscopic filters
to limit participants’ available visual information. This
interactive experience demonstrates a tool to enhance
visual information processing. Participants play a simple
game of catch while wearing the Nike Strobe.
Recovering a naturalistic 3D scene from a
single 2D image
Stephen Sebastian, Joseph Catrambone, Yunfeng Li, Tadamasa
Sawada, Taekyu Kwon, Yun Shi, Robert M. Steinman,
and Zygmunt Pizlo (Purdue University)
We will demonstrate how a naturalistic 3D scene can be
recovered from a single 2D image taken with a calibrated
camera like the human eye once Figure and Ground are
organized and providing that the direction of gravity is
known.
Silent updating of color changes
Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez (Harvard University)
When a vivid display of many color-changing dots is
rotated about its center, the colors appear to stop changing.
Face-Face-Revolution: A game in real-time
facial expression recognition
Jim Tanaka (University of Victoria), Marni Bartlett, Javier Movellan,
and Gwen Littlewort (University of California, San Diego),
Serena Lee-Cultura (University of Victoria)
Face-Face-Revolution is an interactive computer game
intended to enhance the facial expression abilities of children
with autism. The game utilizes the Computer Expression
Recognition Toolbox (CERT) developed by Marni
Bartlett and Javier Movellan at UC San Diego’s Machine
Perception Lab.
Perceived gaze direction does not reverse
in the mirror (although everything else
does)
Dejan Todorovic and Oliver Toskovic (University of Belgrade,
Serbia)
When a mirror is set at 90 degrees to a portrait that appears
to gaze at the observer, the mirror image of the portrait also
appears to gaze at the observer, rather than at the mirror
image of the observer.
Attention-based motion displacement
Peter Tse (Dartmouth College), Patrick Cavanagh (Université
Paris Descartes)
Attention-based motion displacement.
The plastic effect: perceiving depth quality
Dhanraj Vishwanath and Paul Hibbard (University of St.
Andrews)
We demonstrate stereoscopic quality in the absence of
binocular disparities and even under depth cue conflict.
The effects suggest that depth quality (the plastic effect) is
a fundamental aspect of depth and distance perception and
not an epiphenomenon of binocular vision.
Two faces of Albert Einstein: The effects
of realism on the concave/convex face
illusion
Albert Yonas and Sherryse Corrow (University of Minnesota)
A concave mask of a face may appear convex when viewed
monocularly. This demo will allow the viewer to discover
whether a realistically colored rendering of a face produces
a more powerful convex illusion than an unpainted grey
plastic face.
VPixx Technologies
Peter April and Jean-Francois Hamelin
VPixx Technologies, a VSS exhibitor, will be hosting the
second annual response-time showdown during demo
night this year. The demo is a simple game in which you
must press a red or green button as fast as you can when
the button lights up and you hear a beep. Do it well, and
win a prize! The fastest hands in 2009 came from the University
of Montreal. Who will win this year?
***NEW THIS YEAR***
Demo Night and the Best Illusion of the Year Contest (hosted by the Neural
Correlate Society) will both be held on the same night.
The Best Illusion of the Year Contest will be held from 5:00 - 7:00 pm at the
Philharmonic Center for the Arts.
The Demo Night dinner will be held at the Naples Grande from 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Demo Night will be held from 7:30 - 10:00 pm at the Naples Grande.
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