Sightseeing and inspiration

Just back from a city break to Rome and was really inspired by how people view their surroundings - lots of beautiful typical art surrounded by modern graffiti and posters all blending to create some great visual landscapes.

Olafur Eliasson

Gair got me on to this artist; Olafur Eliasson, whose work I am really enjoying finding out about. Lots of immersive interactivity through visuals and tangible components. Nice.

Augmented reality part 3

Brilliant - and something I want to explore more. Enjoying exploring various virtual and real visual perceptions.

Amazing colour changing card trick.........

....or is it?

Augmented reality part 2

I am starting to do some experimentation with augmented reality and trying out visual illusions. Would be great to get some test runs done in time for my presentation in a week or so. Some of them have shown great reults and as I mentioned earlier, I'd like to have some kind of interactivity as per the test run below done in flash using web cam motion detection (very similar to the nintendo Wii idea) to possibly create an augmented reality interaction. Maybe the imagery could be used to create an illusion of some kind, or possibly see if people are initially aware of their visual environment by including something unexpected. It feels like I am getting somewhere now with my development.....

Augmented Reality

Have been reading an interesting article on Augmented Reality written by James R Vallino that looks at the aspects of it and how it can be utilised. This has now got me thinking further about where my installation can go, and I have started to consider the aspect of eye tracking or face recognition and the possiblity of users being able to take part in a large interactive illusion. Possibly using cameras and sensors running through MaxMSP with face recognition and once tracked then somehow the users can distort other participants views or visual perceptions.......hmmmm. This one needs a bit more thought and time....

Further research

Greg got back in contact and it will hopefully mean that I can take part in the composite interviews playing the part of a victim/witness next Wednesday which will be great. In the meantime I have been researching and developing further ideas in visual cognition. Professor Nick Wade in the psychology dept at Dundee University has an intriguing website based on various visual illusions. I've also come across a few more, including;





Moving the first towards and away from you will create the illusion of movement, the second shows an example of retinal fatigue, staring at the cross in the centre of the box, the dots will start to disappear. Finally click on the third to see an example of an afterimage, which is a visual impression that remains in the retina after the initial stimulus is removed. The afterimage always has colours that are complementary to those of the original image. Look steadily at the cross in the centre of the picture.