Each year VSS solicits its membership to submit creative visual images related to the field of vision science, the Society, or the VSS meeting. Traditionally, the winning images are featured on the program, abstracts book, signage, and t-shirts. Due to the online format this year, the winning image appears as the banner throughout the VSS 2021 website.
The Vision Sciences Society is pleased to recognize Susanne Stoll as the winner of the V-VSS 2021 Graphics Competition. Her image, shown above and below, is entitled Global Vision.
Global Vision
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so is the interpretation of Global Vision. However, as with most things in life, there is no end product without a mission. As such, Global Vision attempts to unify three facets of this year’s VSS meeting.
The first facet relates to what we are all striving for, namely understanding vision and how we perceive the ever-changing world around us visually. The second facet is meant to reflect the increased accessibility of this year’s gathering due to its virtual nature, with us being distributed all over the globe. The third facet relates to the multi-focal character of the VSS and thus its broad scope, bringing together expertise from various subdomains, including visual psychophysics, visual neuroscience, computational vision, visual cognition, and bordering fields.
Global Vision attempts to feature these facets by dynamically projecting a map of the world onto the right eye of an unknown other standing right in front of you. A static circular searchlight takes snapshots of the map, generating a globe as much as the right iris of the unknown other. The different snapshots can be interpreted to echo an ever-changing world, the different regions the VSS schedules events in (broadly) as well as the subdisciplines the VSS unites. The circular VSS logo hosts a pupil and is thought to represent the left iris. The wavy lines (or sinusoids) demarcate the overall shape of the right and left eye, but can also be seen as a decorative element encapsulating the different facets.
By looking you right in the eyes, Global Vision is also meant to ask you quite candidly what your global vision is.
Special thanks go to my colleagues and friends in London and Auckland, the Board of Directors, and the VSS organization team for providing constructive feedback on my design idea. I wish everybody a superb and insightful V-VSS 2021.
About Susanne Stoll
Susanne Stoll completed her undergraduate studies in Psychology at the University of Tübingen, followed by an MSc in Mind and Brain at Humboldt University of Berlin. Currently, she is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Sam Schwarzkopf and Dr. John Greenwood at University College London. Her research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging and population receptive field (pRF) modeling to investigate how perceptual grouping and spatial attention modulate the visual brain’s representation of visual information. Susanne also has a keen interest in relating pRF properties to behavior as well as counteracting regression fallacies and probing the validity of analysis procedures in visual neuroimaging and beyond.