Mr. B's Blog

I think that most of us have received an email or have come across some sort of optical illusion while surfing the web. Optical illusions are very prevalent throughout the internet. While I was studying at the University of Lethbridge, I had the opportunity to take quite a few psychology classes. The most interesting psych classes where the ones about cognition and perception. I have always been fascinated about how we perceive the world and tricks that our minds can play on us. Because of this interest I have also done many searches on the Net to find some good illusion sites. The one that I think is the best and the most comprehensive is a site by Michael Bach. On his site he has 72 different illusions and visual phenomenon for you to feast your eyes on. Some of the sections that he has on his site are listed below with examples:

Another illusion I thought I would mention which is not on this site but in my all time favorite illusion is the color aftereffect illusion found here.

Motion & Time

• »Stepping feet« illusion 1 – strong, beautiful and (relatively) easy to understand
• Motion Induced Blindness – an unexplained optical illusion of disappearing dots
• Stereokinetic Phenomenon – an optical illusion of 3D from motion (aka »kinetic depth effect«)
• »Rotating Snake« Illusion – with a new explanatory twist
• Pinna-Brelstaff Illusion
• Motion Aftereffect – also known as »waterfall effect«
• Spiral Motion Aftereffect – more effective for some
• Roget’s Palisade Illusion

Luminance & Contrast

• Hermann’s Grid – fleeting luminance illusions
• Hermann’s Grid bent – a new twist, refuting the classical explanation
• Scintillating Grid – strong fleeting luminance illusions
• Induced grating – classical brightness contrast

Colour

• »Lilac Chaser« – a rapid aftereffect, colours move which aren’t really there
• Benham’s Top – colour from spatio-temporal patterns
• Neon Colour Spreading

• Geometric- & Angle Illusions

• Hering Illusion – and other angular interactions
• Poggendorff Illusion – a classical geometric optical illusion with a new twist
• Fraser’s Spiral

Space, 3D & Size Constancy

• Müller-Lyer Illusion – test your bisection accuracy
• Moon illusion
• T-illusion
• Sine Illusion

Cognitive- / Gestalt Effects

• Blur & picture content – spatial filtering (or high frequency masking)
• Hidden message - blur & figure-ground discrimination
• Kanizsa’s Triangle – depends on context
• Blotted letters – Gestalt completion

Specialties with faces

• Rotating face mask – hollow faces
• Find the Face (in the Beans) – a picture puzzle
• The face on Mars – imaginations of perception
• The »Thatcher Illusion« – inverted faces lose their emotional message

As you know I am a science teacher and in the courses that I teach I get the chance to show them microscopes and how they work. I was trying to find a way to show the students things based on scale relative to one another. I found a nifty little flash simulation at www.nikon.co.jp. What this site does is uses scientific notation of the meter from 10^27 m to 10^-15 m. It is really interesting to look at things relative to each other according to size and what magnitude they fit into. If each section of magnitude it also discusses what each of them mean. For example when you get down to sizes in the 10^-8 m you would be in the nanometer section. It explains that if the earth’s diameter was 1 meter then a one yen coin would be 1 nanometer.

At each section of the scale there are also common objects that are found at these sizes. The best part about this is you can click on each one and it gives you that average size of the object and some interesting facts about it. An example would be when you get to the larger section of the scale that largest object of course is the Outer limits of the Universe. In 2003 NASA estimated that the Universe spans 13.7 billion light years (the distance light travels in one year = 9.5 x 10^12 km). This means it is in the neighborhood of 10^25 meters. Amazingly big! Take a look at the screenshots I have made below. I think this is a really well done site.

I stumbled upon this site the other day (GearLive.com) and found a new watch called the Sleeptracker that is used primarily as a way to wake yourself up in the morning (aka an alarm). This is no ordinary alarm with just another annoying ring or beep to wake you up. Instead it is a sophisticated alarm with an annoying beep or ring to wake you up. To see the complete review click here or here.

Apparently what this watch does is records and keeps track of your sleep cycles during the night. By keeping track of those cycles it can wake you up when you are in your lightest sleep cycle so that you will not feel groggy in the morning. According to the review the watch was tried and actually works. This new technology comes at a price although not a large one you can buy one of these watches for approximately $149 USD. The great thing about this watch is that it actually works although they do not explicitly tell you how this works except that it is top secret patented technology. Some people believe it is a combination of sensor but others think that it is just a motion detector watch and wakes you up when you are moving the most around the time you want to wake up.

Some of the downsides of this watch as pointed out by some long term wearers and my own aesthetic judgment is that it is an ugly watch. Do not expect to get a date wearing this sucker around the town. But if you are only going to wear it to bed at night hopefully your significant other will be accepting of you. People have also complained that the buttons are too big and get hit in the night and beep possibly waking you up.

I am not sure that I am going to go and buy one right away. I am the kind of guy that waits for the price to drop or for some more thorough reviews to make a good decision. Plus I will wait for there to be some competitors out there with similar technologies like this one here at Axon Labs who plan to release a similar gadget sometime.

Pic of SleepTacker

I ran into a website today called Fauxto.com and it is an online photo editor using flash technologies found . The site offers two features. The first and most important feature is the online photo editor. To use this editor it requires you to register (free). The photo editor is much like photoshop but is very simplified. It has the capabilities of image layers, photo filters, selections, layer blend modes, color picker, smudge tool and gradient tool to name a few. You can open up any file that you have on your computer or you can open up a web picture if you know the URL. Some downsides to the image editor is that most of the filters do not have adjustment dialog boxes when you call up a filter, it just dose a default value. There are also no keyboard shortcuts as of yet but am sure they will be included in the future.

The second feature that this website has is an online image browser, where you can upload your own photos to share with others or you can search for images using tags or by user images. I did a couple of searches using keywords that were fairly common like “car” and “friend” and I got zero results from “car” and 1 result from “friend”. The database of images is still quite small so the only way for this to get larger is for people to share their images with others. If you create an online album using the “Share images” link you can then edit these images as well with the Fauxto online image editor “en masse” as they describe it on their opening page.

If you want to see a screen shot of the online image editor take a look at it below.