Folklore & Dispatches

A New Look

After a decade of WordPress it's time to move on.

Open-Source Volumetric Motion Capture

I can’t believe I didn’t update this. A year or so ago, Aidan Montag embarked on a quest to design some affordable and flexible devices for motion capture, camera tracking, and, on a stretch, volume capture. We named…

Audition Tape for Eastman and Berklee

Cringe! Apple being Apple and Apple Music being Apple Music, I recently ‘lost’ some digitized tapes from gigs I did. My total faith in the cloud (Apple Music Cloud to be specific) meant that I had to go…

I Was a Teenage (well, 22 yr old) Model for a Lamp

In which I jump over a trash can. We did a lot of reference footage, back in the day. Here, specifically, in the mid 1980s, we wanted some reference for Luxo, Jr. So, out to the parking lot…

Hayao Miyazaki gave me this Cat Bus. No you can't have it.

Back in the late 80s, Hayao Miyazaki came to visit Pixar. He brought gifts. He had something for everyone, he gave the animation group a Seiko Talking Pyramid Clock. Craig Good and I spent the afternoon trying to…

David Bowie Wants Ideas

I grew up just down river from Ann Magnuson, one half of Bongwater. They informed the world of David’s needs in this wonderful song. In between leaving Pixar and starting back to grad school, I connected with then-former…

A first look at the ChumpCam

Some photos of the Pi Based, Arducam driven camera system.

Stolen Valor

I owe Bausch & Lomb an explanation. In high school, I convinced my Chemistry teacher that my time for that class was better spent at the local community college (Go Flood Wall Tech … Steamers?) learning Calculus, since…

Pixar Retirement Keyboard

An example of the clash between Caps Lock and 40+ years of emacs motor control. When I ‘retired’ from Pixar in 1992 to go back to grad school, my friends got me a (digital) gold watch. Neftali “El…

The Veiled Virgin illustrates visual segmentation of shape by cause

The geometry of the physical object does not represent the visual experience. Three-dimensional (3D) shape perception is one of the most important functions of vision. It is crucial for many tasks, from object recognition to tool use, and…

Perceptual plausibility of exaggerated realistic motion

Squashing and stretching our way across the uncanny valley. Abstract The informal heuristic practices of the fine arts have much to offer to our understanding of the appearance of phenomenological reality. One interesting example is the use of exaggeration to…

Turdpaint

In my computer graphics youth, everyone wrote two programs – a 2D paint program and a 3D renderer. Such was the curriculum of the time. Ed Tripp taught CIS 781-2-3, a three quarter sequence that took you from…

Papa's Draft Card

Found my Grandfather’s draft card in a bunch of my Dad’s stuff. About a year before my Grandfather passed away, I visited him and he pulled his draft card out of his wallet. He handed it to me…

Oh the things you'll find…

I’m cleaning up a bunch of archived files. While I was in grad school, after Pixar, I did a little bit of consulting to make ends meet. One of the more fun things that I did was write…

MacRenderMan

Some historical floppy disk fun from old Pixar days. When Pixar decided to sell RenderMan to the public we had to come up with a good name (It was REYES, Renders Everything You’ve Ever Saw / Seen). You…

Chernobyl Personal Geiger Counter

Issued to residents of Chernobyl and surrounding areas after the Chernobyl Disaster. Last I played with it, it still worked. It takes some pretty weird batteries and I think a coil has cracked inside, so I need to…

On Talks and Slides

Some history of style. Once upon a time, Ed Tufte called me a “sanctimonious assohole”. I suggested that he up the dosage of his medications and stopped recommending his books to my students and colleagues. But — The…

The PICS 2000

A medical imaging workstation – the beginning of volume imaging When I got my interview at Pixar, I was at Ohio State working on volumetric rendering of CT and MR images. There are a few callbacks to that…

Listerine Hack

How to drink a few bottles of Listerine, scare your clients, and ultimately see your clients repeat your prank. I told this story to Penn years ago and he decided it was worthy of a place in their…

Highland Aire

I just finished a row. It’s about 99% humidity this morning, which, to credit Chris Wedge, reminds me of having just rowed inside someone’s mouth. Chris and I used to ride our bikes together when we were at…

Cat Came Back Jeans

Sometime in the late 80’s, I was a guest at a Spike n’ Mike animation festival, Santa Cruz I think. A bunch of us from Pixar went down, JL was probably the only ‘true’ special guest, but somehow…

IMSAI 8080

Back and forth in time… The IMSAI 8080 was the first “clone” microcomputer, introduced in 1975 – a lower cost version of the MITS Altair 8800, introduced a year earlier in 1974. I first saw the Altair on…

AR Air Hockey

Freshman Imaging Project ‘sports ball tracking’ project demo for RIT Undergraduate Research presentation. And the poster

Chuck Csuri – 1922-2022

Research is just an excuse to have fun and make some crazy art. — Chuck, early 1980s I showed up in Columbus in 1982, a first-generation college student, intent on getting something out of the opportunity to get…

My Favorite Screen Credit

I don’t think IMDB has a category for this role. I’ll drop this here briefly, but this is a slide from Pete Docter‘s Student Academy Award winning short film, Next Door. I will put together a whole post…

Tropicana Commercials – Warehouse

We did a whole bunch of commercial for Tropicana. This was our second — This was the second in a series we did for Tropicana. The first one we did was much simpler, a logo and orange in…

Pixar Goes Commercial…

An article from Computer Graphics World, circa June 1986. $125K for the entry level, in mid-1980’s dollars. You still needed a host (Sun-2 at the time was a good choice) and, if I recall, a display device. There’s…

Folklore

This is what I had on my desk when I arrived at Pixar. A Sun-2 (the CPU cabinet is ‘desk side’) and a Barco monitor. 640 x 480. That optical mouse was great, so much better than the…

Sony XBR Club

The XBR was Sony’s top-of-the-line consumer CRT TV, back in the good old days. So elite, you got to join a club. I believe it stood for “eXtra BRight”. Steve May used to mock it, calling it the…

In the future, you'll just download the STL and fix it yourself

Well, not quite. Back when I started doing 3D printing (around 2002 or so, very expensive, very cool) one piece of sales hype was – Soon, when your dishwasher breaks, you’ll just buy the STL for the part…

libDraw – Interactive drawing on the Pixar Image Computer

Back in the 1980s I wrote a bunch of software as part of the volumetric medical imaging system we designed for Philips (nee Picker) Medical. We used to document our code in those days. I was digging through some archival stuff of mine, looking for an implementation of Bresenham’s line algorithm I wrote for Mathematica, and this document popped up.

A Year Ago Today, I Wrote on Nextdoor

I have a condition that prevents me from wearing pants. I also have a note from my doctor. Notarized. I hesitate to describe it, alas, my condition is this — Being a middle aged dad, I have no…

Visual perception of surface properties through direct manipulation

VSS21 – tangible materials. Some work we started at RIT / Gießen right before the universe shut down for a virus break. Snehal was quite the trooper, carrying it on while the rest of us were huddled in…

Resilience of temporal processing to early and extended visual deprivation

Dynamic vision is preserved in the face of early visual deprivation. Static acuity – not so much. This is a project Pawan and a whole bunch of us started a few years ago, pre plague. This is quite…

VSS 2021

Yu, Phillips & Todd 2021, Regions of High Curvature Facilitate the Perception of 3D Shape from Shading, VSS. After the past year of chaos I’m happy to have literally anything to show. Turns out I have more than…

WTC Mathematica Live Coding Championship

This Thursday, 8 October, at 6 PM EDT, the Wolfram Technology Conference Live Coding Challenge. As in years past, I will be your genial co-host, along with Philip Maymin – It’s a total blast to watch people competitively…

Bouncing Balls of Exaggeration

A poster from VSS2019, finally about to submit the paper. Looking at animation, physics, and the impossible yet perceptually preferable exaggeration therein. Phillips, F., Schmidt, F., Noejovich, L., & Chakalos, G. (2018). Exploring the Uncanny Valley. Journal of Vision, 18(10),…

History of Jazz Drumming

Mel Lewis’ epic interviews with Loren Schoenberg on the history of drumming in jazz. A good while back, Jim Rupp lent me a bunch of CDs. He said “you’ll like these” and he was right. For years, I…

Dangerous awards

A visit to Champaign, a return flight with a ‘possible weapon’. I went to the 2019 Wolfram Technical Conference last week in snowy Champaign Illinois. I gave a talk on some stuff we were doing in our classes…

Apples and Oranges

A talk I gave at the Wolfram Technology Conference, 2019. In our “Computational Methods for Psychology and Neuroscience” course, we teach undergraduate students the fundamentals of computational thinking (as opposed to traditional “programming”) using a project-based approach. Over…

Two recent submissions

So many things on the burner. First – The Veiled Virgin paper has been submitted. We didn’t put it on a preprint server yet, we’re trying to figure out what we want to do there. If you’d like…

So, about RIT

Time for a change of venue. A long time ago I left Pixar and went back to graduate school because I was interested in understanding more about the creative stuff we did — How the tools facilitated, constrained,…

Temporal consequences of spatial acuity reduction

Space-time visual insanity. Some work I collaborated on concerning spatiotemporal vision. We have some very interesting findings hinted at in the ‘Puzzles’ section that I look forward to us getting out there. Temporal consequences of spatial acuity reduction…

Effects of the Spatial Spectrum of Illumination on Material Perception

A little VSS 2019 fun with some old friends. Old as in length of time we’ve all known each other, not in geologic age. Like all good science, things changed a little between abstract submission and the actual…

Objects, Materials, Exaggeration, and Perception

For a talk @ the ASU SciHub SciAPP Workshop on Science, the Arts & Possibilities in Perception. It is tempting to think of perception as some form of physical measurement. Indeed, animals seem to act as if they are…

Arduino Spectrophotometry

Well, OK, just measuring ambient light for now… but we’ll get there in class soon. Students in my Computational Methods class are using an Arduino to do some simple sensor measurement stuff. I found a bunch of old…

TAPASI – Monkeys and Microstimulation

Some monkeys and some microstimulation. Courtesy of Gabe Diaz, a little scene from Graziano, Taylor and Moore, 2002. Dots indicate trajectory of the left arm after microstimulation of the right hemisphere PFC. Remember kids – PFC does everything!…

Wasting Time – TheraPutty

Yes, so many other things I could be doing, but this is more important – using a webcam, some Mathematica, and therapy putty. Somehow, as I age, I keep accidentally hurting myself. I know, weird right? So, while…

The Archives of Potentially Amusing Scientific Images (TAPASI)

Wherein serious but silly scientific images are archived. A few months ago, I was having lunch with Sarah Creem-Reger at a conference at UofR. Somehow, the conversation got around to publishing and I relayed a story told to me…

Publish Magazine — August 1989

A short piece about our wedding announcements, printed on a 100-year-old Heidelberg press via computer graphics. I posted an interview from fps Magazine a while back, and one of my old Wolfram Era Pals, Paul Abbott, asked about the wedding…

Animation Magazine — 1989

Unbeknownst to me until several year later, my dad kept a copy of this in his car to show anyone he ever ran into. Right after we completed knickknack, Animation Magazine did a story on the animation group at…

Computer Pictures Magazine – Jan 1987

In 1984, I started working at the Ohio State Computer Graphics Research Group on a medical imaging project. In the same basement box with interview from fps magazine that I posted a bit ago, I found a few other…

fps interview – 1995

Published from 1991-2010, fps was an excellent animation magazine with an impressive cast of regular contributors. Shortly after I left Pixar in 1992, the publisher Emru Townsend got in touch with Tony Apodaca and me for a long-running email…

Why Does the Cortex Reorganize After Sensory Loss?

Investigating the Teleology of Cortical Reorganization A growing body of evidence demonstrates that the brain can reorganize dramatically following sensory loss. Although the existence of such neuroplastic crossmodal changes is not in doubt, the functional significance of these…

Retina and LGN

A demonstration written in Mathematica to show the interaction of the retina and LGN on the sampling of image information from the eyes. You can play with the receptive field size to see how the whole “Hybrid Images”…

VSS 2018 – Shape scission: causal segmentation of shape

Warts, cracks, causal shape segmentation. Research on shape perception usually focuses on the estimation of local surface geometry through cues like stereopsis, shading, or texture. Here, we argue that observers use these shape estimates to infer other object…

VSS 2018 – Gravity and Ground Plane Geometry in Perspective Images

“The small things float to the top of… gravity” — Rickie Lee Jones Renaissance artists noticed that placing objects on a visible ground plane anchors them stably, making it easy to perceive their depth. Subsequently, they developed methods…

VSS 2018 – Exploring the Uncanny Valley

Balls! Bouncing balls. This is science so we gotta start somewhere. Mori’s Uncanny Valley phenomena isn’t limited to robotics. It has been observed in many other areas, including the fine arts, especially photorealistic painting, sculpture, computer graphics, and…

VSS…

I’ve got strong last-minute game. Editing my VSS stuff on the Uncanny Valley. I’ll post something here when I get back.

Fechner’s Aesthetics Revisited

Isn’t it beautiful? Gustav Fechner is widely respected as a founding father of experimental psychology and psychophysics but fewer know of his interests and work in empirical aesthetics. In the later 1800s, toward the end of his career,…

Combinational Imaging: Magnetic Resonance Imaging and EEG Displayed Simultaneously

Before fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) existed, I got to do this. We were one of the first labs to do this pre ‘functional’ functional imaging. Instead of volume rendering (which I would move on to Pixar to…

The perception of surface orientation from multiple sources of optical information

The first piece of work in did in the “Todd Lab” at OSU. I had just come off five years at Pixar and a year back in grad school in the Architecture and Planning department. I wrote most of…

Spring 2018 Vision in Animals, Humans and Machines — Final Projects

Vision in Humans, Animals and Machines is a seminar / hands-on course where we engage in a sort of comparative neuroscience with respect to how organic and inorganic systems ‘see’. Some things are hard for animals, some things…

Spring 2018 Computational Methods — Final Projects

The goal of Computational Methods in Psychology and Neuroscience is to acquaint students with scientific computing, broadly speaking, but especially as it applies to psychology and neuroscience. Even so, it attracts students from a pretty wide swath of majors….

Perceiving Object Shape from Specular Highlight Deformation, Boundary Contour Deformation, and Active Haptic Manipulation

Haptic and visual ‘contours’ It is well known that motion facilitates the visual perception of solid object shape, particularly when surface texture or other identifiable features (e.g., corners) are present. Conventional models of structure-from-motion require the presence of…

Haptic shape discrimination and interhemispheric communication

Touching. In three experiments participants haptically discriminated object shape using unimanual (single hand explored two objects) and bimanual exploration (both hands were used, but each hand, left or right, explored a separate object). Such haptic exploration (one versus…

Creating noisy stimuli

So much noise. A method for creating a variety of pseudo-random \`noisy’ stimuli that possess several useful statistical and phenomenal features for psychophysical experimentation is outlined. These stimuli are derived from a pseudo-periodic function known as multidimensional noise….

Perceptual representation of visible surfaces

What is a surface, anyway? Two experiments are reported in which we examined the ability of observers to identify landmarks on surfaces from different vantage points. In Experiment 1, observers were asked to mark the local maxima and…

Complicated sports and movie watching

While I was on sabbatical in Gießen I was thrilled to have super (über?) fast internet and a nice television. Unfortunately for me, the good folks at Apple / Netflix / HBO / etc, don’t want people in…

Gromitcam – in stereo

Back in 1997 I made a stereo webcam for keeping track of my dog, Gromit. I was rolling through some archives and found an image from January 1998. It used two Logitech golf-ball cams and a bunch of…

You can take the boy out of architecture school

This is a rodent enclosure for behavioral experiments. We printed the main cage, post retainers and lid with ABS from our uPrint and the ‘stay off the roof’ roof with our Formlabs in a nice, slick durable resin….

Testre le embed das iframe

This is a test of an embedded iframe of fun and joy. Please excuse anything annoying. \[advanced\_iframe securitykey=”c8f174978f95886638babe6f19ad6e691566779b” src=”https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/daf49e5e-2e03-4c1e-b1c4-b5750bbd5fdc?\_view=frameless” width=”100%” height=”600″\] Most sincerely.

Bouncing Balls

A phase-space plot of height v. exaggeration for two different types of balls with two different coefficients of restitution. Nothing important here, just a fun looking plot.

Fencing Eyetracking Data

A while back, we did a nice study on eye movements during fencing. This is a figure from one of the posters, we should finish this and publish it some day. Should do a lot of things.  …

Mathematica / Wolfram Language support for Microsoft VSCode

I whipped up some simple syntax support for Mathematica / Wolfram Language in Microsoft’s VSCode. Grab it here: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=flipphillips.wolfram-language.

Medical Imaging, 1986 Style.

I was going through some slides for a talk today and I stumbled on this one from 1986 of a tool I wrote for analyzing cardiac ejection fraction. You can tell it’s old because it’s in black and…

Mmmm, fresh data

Some data from the summer project on the Uncanny Valley. Can’t give it all away yet- but this is cool so far.

Travels in the uncanny valley

Here’s a screencast of my talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology Symposium on VR/AR Technology. It is from 3 December and a little low-key, so drink a little coffee before you start watching so you don’t fall…

Enhancing research with Plenary Labs

A new pub with some good friends on the impending doom of science funding and what to do about it. Authored well before the new administration was a gleam in our collective eyes.   Citation: Pawan Sinha, Peter…

Quick class description

For those of you looking for the course description of “Vision in Animals and Machines” that I failed to send to the Registrar, look no more! Vision in Animals and Machines PS-312, Fall 2017 This class will focus…

Fuzzy Logic package for Mathematica

I was working on a project in Gießen last week and needed some code I wrote back in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s. Sadly, this is no replacement for the super cool FuzzyLogic Mathematica package (RIP). It…

More drawing research

Veiled Virgin Stuff for VSS 2017

Getting a Student License for Mathematica at Skidmore

I use Mathematica in many of my classes and all of my research. You may need to use it for some homework and projects. The versions installed in the Labs and other Public computers at Skidmore are usually a version or…

Image Flow Calculations

The Image Flow (ala Roland Fleming) of one of Eric Egan’s dissertation potatoes-

Implicit madness

A sparse implicit surface. It needs to be less sparse.

Shape metrics

OSU MRI Flashback – 1984

I was younger then, and I lived near the water. I was doing MRI when they still referred to it as ‘NMR Imaging’. People got a little freaked out by the ‘nuclear’ bits. (But seriously, that’s my favorite…

Glaven Object Files

I’ve posted the Glaven STL and OBJ object files in the Software, Data & Geometry section. Go have a look and let me know if you use them or even download them for that matter.

Gibson 'Feelie' Object Files

I’ve created a OBJ and STL repository of printable / renderable versions of Gibson’s ‘feelies’ haptic dataset. Go have a look and let me know if you download and/or use them.

Luxo Bookmark

Here’s something that might interest the Pixar fans/geeks out there-   I was cleaning up my lab today, and I found a copy of the RenderMan Companion (hey- I animated that cover image!) with a bookmark in it — more…

Raspberry Pi Zero Clock Drift

So I built a device that uses the Raspberry Pi + a Hardware RTC.   I thought I’d look at the drift as reported by \`hwclock -c\` over the course of a day. So, here you go-

Haptic Recurrence

Some haptic exploration recurrence. More on this later- CORM!

Colorful Visualization of the day

An in-development look at some age judgement data. Not sure what it is telling me yet, but I can’t let that stop me from looking at it?

Temporal Integration at Extremely Low Contrast

Gabe Diaz’ thesis from 2004.   The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between the abil- ity to recognize objects at very low contrasts and the duration for which they are presented. Empirical evidence suggests…

Specularity and Shape from Line Drawings

Indications of shape via specularity in line drawings. PDF here: Mazzarella2014

Volumes

Doing a little work on a fluid-flow project with some folks here- Wrote a volume renderer for it, basically re-visiting work I did in 1986 at The OSU CGRG, which eventually was applied to stuff we did with the volume…

Progress, visualized?

On Labradoodles and Fried Chicken

(21 March – Updated with more images…) I recently saw a post on twitter from @teenybiscuit, subsequently picked up by NPR here . You’ve probably seen it, dogs, muffins and a whole bunch of other things that look…

My eyes!

OK, just sort of messing around while making some stimuli for this experiment. I’m as creeped out as you are. I promise.

Gießen and the Virgin

Some early experiment data with the Veiled Virgin. I could explain it, but it would give away the study before we even started. So, you’ll have to just do your best to figure out what is going on for now….

I'm changing things

Yes, this is that classic ‘under construction’ post. I’m moving things around. Cleaning things up. Posting PDFs. Singing a little song.

Virgin position map

X,Y,Z in R,G,B .

Oh, Henry.

Visual & Haptic Geometry of 3D Shape Discrimination

Phillips, F., O’Donnell, E. & Kernis, N. Visual and haptic geometry of 3D shape discrimination. Journal of Vision 15, 866–866 (2015). PDF Some preliminary work on ‘where you look when you’re trying to discriminate 3D objects.’ Turns out, it’s…

Some historical stuff – Functional Imaging before Functional Imaging

Torello, M. W., Phillips, T., Hunter, W. W., Jr. & Csuri, C. A. Combinational Imaging. Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology 4, 274–293 (1987). PDF Volumetric brain oblique. Rendered on a Pixar Image Computer, circa 1987. This is a schizophrenic…

Whatcha lookin' at?

Some data from Emerson, Max + My summer work. Heat map, where one person looked while making shape discrimination decisions. I think I’ll take a vacation now.

Omega-style headphone stand

For my birthday I bought myself a nice set of headphones — Grado PS500. They were sitting on my desk, in a pile of coffee stained Natures and strange SkidShop snack-bags. So I designed and printed the following,…

Wolfram Programming Cloud

You can create this: \[WolframCloudAPI id=”a99541cf-90ab-4b52-ab5c-cd6b632f4c7f” rule=”62″ step=”30″\] With this: \[wlcode\] CloudDeploy\[APIFunction\[{ “rule” -> Restricted\[“Number”, {0, 255, 1}\] -> 30, “step” -> Restricted\[“Number”, {0, Infinity, 1}\] -> 50 }, ArrayPlot\[CellularAutomaton\[#rule, {{1}, 0}, #step\], Frame -> False\] &, “PNG”…

A day of problem solving pictures.

One of the things I love about using Mathematica is that it helps me better understand the nature of my programming and problem solving. It’s a great tool to help make sense of problems, see your errors, verify…

More good bad results

Some days, things don’t go well, but you end up with interesting looking things anyway.

Glaven Explorer

Very preliminary, for Eric. \[WolframCDF source=”http://flipphillips.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Glerp.cdf” width=”433″ height=”520″ altimage=”/images/uploads/2014/06/Glerp.png” altimagewidth=”433″ altimageheight=”520″\]

When I do the wrong thing…

\[WolframCDF source=”http://flipphillips.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/wtf.cdf” width=”320″ height=”415″ altimage=”https://academics.skidmore.edu/blogs/flip/?p=432″ altimagewidth=”” altimageheight=””\] A small issue with a contour plot based on a very efficient Value Noise implementation (well, efficient for Mathematica). It eventually looks like this, which is the ‘right thing’ \[WolframCDF source=”http://flipphillips.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/notwtf.cdf”…

Pegged. It will come back to you?

Doing a sort of gigantic parallel computation in Mathematica. A little too gigantic, I’m afraid. Um- can IT deliver my new MacPro sooooon? Pleeeeease?

Abby Normal

I was trying to figure out why there were shading artifacts on a 3D object I created for some vision experiments. I’ve got a metric-ton of Mathematica I’ve written over the years for doing computational geometry and it stood…

NewGlaven

Back in 1987 I wrote some code for generating ‘noisy objects’. I cleaned up that code over the years, enhanced some calculations, played with new Mathematica features. Now I’ve got stuff that looks like this. I’ll put a…

Vision Science 2014 poster

Here’s Phillips, Mazzarella & Docter (2014) for VSS. Get the PDF here Phillips2014 (Draft of 13 May). Specularity and shape from line drawings. If you’re in Florida next week drop in and say ‘hi’. Or not. An interesting thought: this could…

VSS Analysis Continues

It never ends. Depth maps.

Pete Experiment

Going to have to hurry up to get my stuff ready for VSS. So much data, so little time. A project I’m working on with Julia Mazzeralla and my ol’ pal Pete Docter.

Slippy slidy particles

A friend of mine asked me a question about the way that standing waves make sand on a 2D plate make pretty patterns. So, I whipped up a quick 1D example in Mathematica. I threw 50 randomly distributed…

Recurrence, heat maps, trajectories and fixations

More analysis from Dave Jacobs’ eye tracking project. We wrote all the analysis code ourselves in Mathematica. There’s a bug in the heat map compositing, but I shall procrastinate a solution soon. Lifted largely from Eye Tracking: A comprehensive…

Recurrence plot

Eye tracking recurrence ala Anderson et al. 2013. With Dave Jacobs and the amazing Yarbus and Babcock software packages.

Curvature Field Computations

Curvature field calculations for a random noisy shape. Colors represent magnitude of curvature. Iso-contours also shown in lovely pink.

Hairy Glaven

Hairy elongated noisy stimulus.   The lines are surface normals, sampled across the object. They are generated using a continuous random method (sometimes called ‘noise’) and were used to test symmetry perception in 3D shape.      …

Sculpted Golden Boy

A stimulus, # 13, otherwise known as ‘golden boy’ Colors indicate mapping of under- and over-sculpt from a shape production experiment where we had artists and non-artists reproduce shapes using only vision, touch, or some combination of both…

Statistical Shape of 3D Objects.

Statistical distribution of shape on a 3D object.   A bell pepper from Norman et al. Each color represents a class of shape ala Koenderink’s “Shape Index”. The histogram below shows the distribution along with a key to the…

Anticipation of Sabre Fencing Attacks

A set of motion-capture trajectories for the Anticipation of Sabre Fencing Attacks paper by Pete Possidente and I.   You can see the ‘whip’ of the tip of the sabre at the end of the attack (green dots on…

Photon Noise

Photon noise. Light… noisy. Shhh. If you listen, you can hear it. Rendered via RenderMan.

Volume Render of Fish Neural Development

A volume rendering (again, via Mathematica) of some developing neural structures in zebrafish. With Aaron Beck and Jen Bonner @ Skidmore.

Marroquin patterns

I notice that I seem to generate a lot of images while doing analysis, largely using Wolfram Research’s Mathematica…   so, maybe every day I should post one of those images here- an image of something I’m working on,…

Yankee Candle

We were just discussing interesting candle-scents in my Computational class. Just thought of a new one: Lab Report

Google glass

Scheduled my pickup. Now to just avoid looking like a total tool while wearing them.   To quote the great Keavin Meany… “I don’t care, zoom zoom zoom”

Artisanal HTML

A friend was talking up his ‘hand-made’ web site recently. Apparently, websites that appear 1994 vintage are all the rage these days. As a follow up, some suggested that he used ‘Artisanal HTML, locally sourced’, and I thought…

3-D printer helps save dying baby

More fun things we could do with the lab’s printer: 3-D printer helps save dying baby – CNN.com. For the full NEJM article, see http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1206319

Science fairs: rewarding talent or privilege? | Sci-Ed

Some of my students probably have something to say about this- Science fairs: rewarding talent or privilege? | Sci-Ed.

An attack on reductionism in neuroscience

Neuroscience needs its Einstein – Salon.com “I was a liberal arts major, prefer stories to hard facts, questions to answers. I prefer ambiguity, mystery and awe to bottom-line explanations. I’m personally offended by fundamentalist and reductionist beliefs, be…

Magic Revealed: Cups Trick Found to Be More Effective Than Thought

Here is that article again, this time from Scientific American. Magic Revealed: Cups Trick Found to Be More Effective Than Thought: Scientific American.

Ancient Magical Illusion Even More Effective Than Magicians May Realize

Ancient Magical Illusion Even More Effective Than Magicians May Realize | Inside Science. I am quoted herein. Let’s hear it for 1) magic and 2) a new open-access journal making the scene. Here’s a link to the…

Moth Drives Robot (VIDEO)

Indeed we are totally screwed once they realize that it was us who invented lightbulbs and bug zappers. Moth Drives Robot (VIDEO).

Sci² Tool : A Tool for Science of Science Research and Practice

Sci² Tool : A Tool for Science of Science Research and Practice.

Crapulent

I was watching my Mac OS screen saver go by, it was randomly on dictionary…

Programmer Interrupted

Programmer Interrupted. A very interesting piece of research on being interrupted whilst writing code. … the office is where we go to get interrupted.