Monday, May 14, 2007, 7:00 -10:00 pm, G.WIZ Science Museum

Please join us Monday night at the G.WIZ Science Museum for the 5th Annual VSS Demo Night, with a barbecue and refreshments to accompany the demonstrations.

Richard O. Brown and Arthur Shapiro have curated 25 demonstrations of visual phenomena by VSS members, highlighting the important roles demonstrations play in vision research and education. These demonstrations will be distributed throughout G.WIZ, amongst the museum’s existing interactive scientific exhibits, which includes 35 exhibits on physics, math and perception on loan from the Exploratorium.

Meal tickets are required. Please wear your VSS badge for entry. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome. You must register your guests at the front entrance of the G.WIZ Science Museum to obtain their entry badges and meal tickets.

Schedule of Events
7:00 – 9:00 pm Complimentary BBQ served on the grass at the back of G.WIZ
7:00 – 9:45 pm Outside and inside bars open – Beer and wine for $3; sodas and water are free
7:00 – 10:00 pm Demos open inside G.WIZ
8:30 – 9:30 pm Complimentary dessert and coffee served inside G.WIZ

Digital Embryo Workshop

Mark Brady, Jay Hegde & Dan Gu, NDSU
Visitors will use the new Digital Embryo Workshop software to simulate various mechanisms in embryological development. The resulting objects are useful tools in the study of camouflage, object learning and object recognition.

LITE and Depth

Kenneth Brecher, Boston University
I will show some new JAVA applets from “Project LITE – Light Inquiry Through Experiments” and some real world devices (Swan cube, pseudoscope, tapered mirror kaleidoscope) that illuminate issues of depth perception.

Fast Faces – An Illusory Reversal Of Temporal Order

Richard Brown & Erik Thogersen, The Exploratorium
This demo combines several paradigms and phenomena to produce an illusion of reversed temporal order in a single location. When a purple square is embedded in a rapidly presented sequence of familiar faces, people commonly report that the face directly preceding the purple square was distinctly perceived as occurring after the purple square.

Aperture Induced Motion

Gideon P. Caplovitz, Dartmouth College
A grating drifting back and forth behind a rectangular aperture will appear to “bounce” up and down, depending on the relative angle between the orientations of the grating and aperture.

Stereo Depth Changes Without Changes in Disparity

Yu-Chin Chai & Bart Farell, Syracuse University
Here we demonstrate that ‘what’ matters for stereo depth perception, which has traditionally been regarded exclusively as a ‘where’ function. The demo shows modulation of stereoscopic depth due solely to changes in relative orientation.

Deforming Grating and Other New Illusions

Simone Gori & Enrico Giora, University of Padua
We will present a new set of illusions where the surprising deformation of the image is due to the motion of the observer or to the motion of the stimuli.

Geometric-Optical Illusions At Isoluminance!

Kai Hamburger, Thorsten Hansen & Karl R. Gegenfurtner, Justus Liebig University
Find out yourself whether geometric-optical illusions break down under conditions of isoluminance. At this demo you can interactively manipulate 9 geometrical-optical illusions shown in classical black-white and under isoluminance.

‘Weaves’

Kai Hamburger & Arthur G. Shapiro, University of Giessen & Bucknell University
We present ‘Weaves’, a pattern that consists of intertwined horizontal and vertical bars. When the vertical and horizontal bars have different luminance levels (luminance-defined weaves), perceptual smudges arise at every other intersection. But when the bars have the same luminance levels (equiluminant weaves) the smudges arise at every intersection–just like the Herman grid.

Visual Therapy Activities

Paul Alan Harris & Susan Barry, Optometric Extension Program Foundation
At this demo you can try for yourselves several activities used in visual therapy for developing binocularity. These will include tabletop and free-space activities, including the Brock String and yoked prism activities.

Anamorphic Stereograms

David Hoffman, Robin Held, Ahna Girshick, & Martin Banks, UC Berkeley
We will show the influence of oblique viewing on perceiving conventional and unconventional stereo pictures. In the conventional case, the 3D scene appears to shear and change in depth, as expected from changes in the retinal images. In the other case, we correct the images so that as viewing position changes, the retinal images remain constant, and the perceived scene changes little if at all.

Gradient-Offset Induced Motion

Po-Jang Hsieh, Gideon Caplovitz & Peter Tse, Dartmouth College
When a gradient stimulus, whose luminance contrast ranges gradually from white on one side to black on the other, is made to disappear all at once so that only the uniform white background remains visible, illusory motion is perceived.

He is Looking at You

Dr. Bernd Kersten & Ruth Walter, University of Bern
Hollow face illusion: A very nice pair of paper-made hollow face figures.

Classification of the Fraser-Wilcox Illusions

Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Ritsumeikan University
Four types of the optimized Fraser-Wilcox illusion will be demonstrated.

Paradoxical Size Reduction in Dynamic Figure/Ground

Lora T. Likova, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
A dynamically-defined figure on a static surround exhibits an illusory size change to appear smaller than its physical extent, while a static figure on a dynamic surround texture appears substantially larger. The size reduction in the dynamic relative to the static figure a paradoxical illusion that challenges conventional explanations at several levels of visual processing analysis.

Paper Folding Demonstration Accompanied with Computer Animation

Keh-Ming Lu & Alan S Tsaur, Asia University, Taiwan
Continuous rotating Napoleon paper building blocks/tessellation

Real-Time Algorithms for Visual Attention and Object Recognition Embodied in a Robotic Head

Robert J. Peters, Lior Elazary, David Berg, Jonathan Harel, Christof Koch, & Laurent Itti, USC & Caltech
A robotic head will make head and eye movements to follow the activity of people and objects in its surroundings, while learning and recognizing visual objects in real time. Viewers will be able to interact with the robotic head by showing new objects for it to learn.

The Phantom Pulse

David Peterzell, UC-San Diego
The demo causes some people to experience what feels like a “phantom limb.” A real-time video image of the observer flickers rapidly between a normal image and a mirror-reversed image. When observers move one of their arms, the other, unmoving arm often begins to tingle, change temperature, and move involuntarily.

Immersive Virtual Reality System Demonstration with Physiological Monitoring

Matthias Pusch, WorldViz LLC
Users will be invited to don a stereo head-mounted display for immersive virtual reality experiences of driving a racecar around a curvy track, and riding a glass elevator in a skyscraper. Simultaneously, finger sensors will measure their Galvanic Skin Responses (GSR) to precisely correlate physiological responses with visual stimuli.

Where Has All The Motion Gone?” And Other Interactive Visual Effects

Arthur Shapiro, Emily Knight, & Tim Johnson, Bucknell University
We present stimulus configurations that create the impression of motion when the stimulus is blurred, but no impression of motion when the stimulus is not blurred. Why is there no motion in the unblurred condition, which must still contain motion signals at low spatial frequencies? We will also present a series of other interactive motion and lightness illusions.

Tilt Effects in Chinese Characters

Shinsuke Shimojo & San-Yuan Lin, Caltech & National Taiwan University.
This demonstration will show tilt illusions in a display of Chinese characters.

DIY Stereograms

David R. Simmons , University of Glasgow
Make simple stereograms and stereo glasses using coloured pencils, coloured filters and cardboard.

Different Realities Using Visual, Auditory, and Audiovisual Stimulations

Yasuto Tanaka, NICT
When we watch video movies, we recognize the reality of the scene in a different manner as situations change, such as visual stimulation only, auditory stimulations only, and visual and auditory stimulations together. I will evaluate these situations by asking observers impressions as well as physical states such as heartbeat.

Infinite Regress Illusion

Peter Ulric Tse & Po-Jang Hsieh, Dartmouth College
Fixate and watch a moving object move continuously away from fixation.

The Induced Spider Web

Christopher Tyler, Smith-Ketlewell Eye Research Institure
Observation of a large uniform aperture within a field of high-frequency dynamic noise reveals that it does not appear uniform but is covered with a tracery of fine dynamic ‘threads’ extending across many degrees of visual space. The tracery lines appear to be near the limit of visual resolution, as though a manic spider were spinning threads to span the aperture in an attempt to fill it with visual structure.

Action-Judgment Dissociation with the Ames Trapezoidal Window Illusion

Albert Yonas & Carl Granrud, University of Minnesota & University of Northern Colorado
The Ames Trapezoidal Window creates a powerful illusion that it is slanted in depth when it is, in fact, in the frontal plane. When viewed with two eyes it appears to be slanted, but when a viewer is asked to point to the edges of the window the illusion is greatly reduced. this action-judgment dissociation is a new finding.

Marilyn Einstein

Aude Oliva, MIT
A hybrid face, combining the low spatial frequencies of Marilyn Monroe’s face with the high spatial frequencies of Albert Einstein’s face, appears to change identity as viewers move closer or further from it.