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
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
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
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
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
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