Publications

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… Read More

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.

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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),… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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”… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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…. Read More

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… Read More

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.

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

More drawing research

Veiled Virgin Stuff for VSS 2017

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.

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… Read More

Specularity and Shape from Line Drawings

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

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… Read More

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… Read More