Monday, May 9, 2011, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Buffet Dinner: 7:00 – 9:00 pm, Vista Ballroom, Sunset Deck and Mangrove Pool
Demos: 7:30 – 10:00 pm, Royal Palm 4-5 and Acacia Meeting Rooms

Please join us Monday evening for the 9th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education.

This year, Arthur Shapiro, Dejan Todorovic, and Gideon Caplovitz are co-curators for Demo Night.

New This Year – We are pleased to announce that ViperLib is sponsoring a “best demo for ViperLib” prize. Thanks in part to the generosity of ECVP, the best demo (or two) will be awarded the honor of being featured on ViperLib and will receive 100 Euros or Pounds Sterling. (The winner gets to decide on their currency of preference).

Buffet dinner is served on the Sunset Terrace, Sunset Deck and Mangrove Pool. Demos are located upstairs on the ballroom level in the Royal Palm 4-5 and Acacia Meeting Rooms.

Be sure to visit the exhibitor area in the Orchid Foyer as some exhibitors have also prepared special demos for Demo Night.
Demo Night is free for all registered VSS attendees. Meal tickets are not required, but you must wear your VSS badge for entry to the Dinner Buffet. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome to attend the demos but must purchase a ticket for dinner. You can register your guests at any time during the meeting at the VSS Registration Desk, located in the Royal Palm Foyer. A desk will also be set up at the entrance to the dinner in the Vista Ballroom at 6:30 pm.

Guest prices: Adults: $25, Youth (6-12 years old): $10, Children under 6: free

A Gilbert Stuart Portrait of You

Krista Ehinger, MIT; Eric Altschuler, MD, PhD, New Jersey Medical School
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) painted the first five US Presidents who died before photography, and also President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) who was photographed. We appreciated such portrait/photograph pairs as a ‘’Rosetta Stone’’ to the pre-photography era, and created a model to obtain photographic representations for those never photographed. We ‘’reverse’’ the model to make ‘’Gilbert Stuart portraits’’ from photos of attendees.

A New Method to Induce Phantom Limbs

Elizabeth Seckel, V.S. Ramachandran, and Beatrix Krause, UCSD; Claude Miller, UCLA
If one is dark adapted, a brief, bright flash may bleach the photoreceptors, allowing whatever is seen during the flash to be “imprinted” on the retinas for several seconds. By uncoupling visual feedback from proprioception, we will give you the experience of phantom limbs!

Bend it like Beckham

Kurt Debono, Alexander C. Schütz, and Karl R. Gegenfurtner, Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany
A pursued target travelling in a straight line on a moving background appears to initially move in the direction of the background before bending towards its veridical direction. The illusion occurs when a peripheral marker is aligned with background motion, and breaks down when it is aligned with target direction.

Blink-Induced-Blindness (BIB) in Multiple-Object-Tracking (MOT) shows when vision does not extrapolate

Deborah J. Aks, Hristyian Kourtev, Harry Haladjian, and Zenon Pylyshyn, Rutgers University; Jiye Shen, SR-Research Ltd.
Do we predict where moving objects reappear when MOT is interrupted? Our blink-contingent demonstration suggests not. When tracking objects that stop during eye-blinks, motion-discontinuities are indistinguishable from continuous motion. Not only do paths appear surprisingly smooth, but tracking is easier. Thus, both percept and performance are not predicted by extrapolation.

Class A procedure for measuring visual aftereffects

Qasim Zaidi and Rob Ennis, Graduate Center for Vision Research SUNY College of Optometry
You will see how to make objective measures of the magnitudes of aftereffects of color, brightness, motion, tilt, spatial-frequency, size, and other visual qualities, using identity judgments on time-varying stimuli. You will also see how you can take this method and apply it to simultaneous adaptation along multiple qualities.

Color Rotation and Expansion/Contraction Standstill

Max R. Dürsteler, University Hospital Zurich
A slowly rotating color wheel with alternating sectors painted in isoluminant colors is perceived as standing still in the presence of a stationary luminance mask. Rings painted in isoluminant colors are alternating expanding or contracting. When shown behind a stationary luminance mask, the precept of expansion or contraction is lost.

Colorful demonstrations of perceptual phenomena

Orit Baruch, University of Haifa
Several perceptual phenomena are demonstrated in paintings. It is demonstrated that our perceptual tendencies obscure other alternatives which may be present in the images.

Dichoptic Completion

Gao Meng, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Li Zhaoping, Department of Computer Science, University College London
We named the illusion “dichoptic completion”, when two very different images in the two eyes are seen simultaneously or complement each other, rather than rivaling against each other, or averaging in perception.

Dyops™ (short for Dynamic Optotypes™) as a revolutionary new method for determining visual acuity

Allan Hytowitz, Animated Vision Associates, LLC; John Hayes, Yu-Chi Tai, Sung Ouk Jang, James Sheedy, Vision Performance Institute, College of Optometry, Pacific University
A constantly rotating segmented image provides a precise measure of acuity based upon the maximum distance for detection of that image rotation as determined by the angular size of that image.

‘’Exorcist 2011’’ – Combining the hollow-face and hollow-torso illusions

Thomas V. Papathomas and Tom Grace, Rutgers Unversity
Hollow masks appear as normal convex faces (hollow-mask illusion) and move as viewers move in front of them. We combine hollow masks and “bollow” (convex) torsos. The result is a compelling illusion: torsos and masks rotate in opposite directions; necks twist in a spectacular fashion (“Exorcist illusion”).

How Does the Brain Determine Size? A Size Weight Shape Illusion

Elizabeth Seckel, UCSD; Edward M Hubbard, Vanderbilt; Eric L Altschuler, New Jersey Medical School; VS Ramachandran, UCSD
120 years ago Charpentier described a remarkable effect: a larger object feels lighter than a smaller object of the same scale-weight. But how does the brain determine ‘’size.’’ Using sets of discs and annuli attendees can experience for themselves that the brain uses only the largest diameter to determine size.

Infinite X: Illusions of perpetual increases in magnitude

Mark W. Schurgin, Brian R. Levinthal, Alexandra List, Aleksandra Sherman, Satoru Suzuki, Marcia Grabowecky, and Steven L. Franconeri, Northwestern University, Psychology
We present a modification of two- and four-stroke motion that creates a sense of perpetual change in more abstract dimensions, such as size and emotion. This experience is highly sensitive to the timing of a blank frame or reversal of polarity. Furthermore, pausing our animations produces a robust after-effect.

Launching apparent motion: The Michotte gun

Sung-Ho Kim, Jacob Feldman, and Manish Singh, Rutgers University
We will demonstrate that the perception of causality can affect apparent motion. Perceived causality can resolve a motion correspondence problem, and also bias the paths of moving objects.

Lifestyle and its impact on your face

David Perrett, Ross Whitehead, David Hunter, Carmen LeFervre, and Dan Re, University of St Andrews
We show visitors how lifestyle affect their face own appearance. Facial fatness predicts current illnesses and early mortality. Smoking and sun exposure hasten age-related skin wrinkling and uneven pigmentation. Increasing fruit and vegetables consumption and exercise benefit health and modify skin colour in ways that enhance healthy appearance.

Meet a robot that navigates and sees as we do

Yunfeng Li and Tadamasa Sawada, Purdue University; Meng Yi and Longin Jan Latecki, Temple University; TaeKyu Kwon and Yun Shi, Purdue University; Robert M. Steinman, University of Maryland; Zygmunt Pizlo, Purdue University
We will demonstrate a seeing robot, who can: (i) solve the figure-ground organization problem, (ii) navigate within a 3D scene, and (ii) recover 3D shapes of objects.

Minimap based navigation with high-fidelity virtual reality.

Matthias Pusch and Paul Elliott, WorldViz
Literally walk through high-fidelity virtual environments in full scale and experience a stunning sense of immersion. With the new WorldViz minimap implementation, you can intuitively move yourself to any location and easily explore arbitrarily large virtual spaces, while using only a small physical footprint. Simply don a stereoscopic head-mounted display and you’re free to walk and explore naturally. Interact with virtual objects using the WorldViz PPT Wand hand interaction device.

Motion aftereffect from an image that isn’t moving, on a test image that isn’t there

Mark Georgeson, Aston University, UK
You adapt briefly to sine gratings whose contrast reverses in sawtooth fashion over time. Stationary test gratings then appear to be drifting. Then, on a completely blank screen, you will see gratings moving in the opposite direction. The effects reflect spatial and temporal gradient filters in motion encoding (Anstis, 1990).

New Star Trek Illusion

Li Li and Diederick Niehorster, and Joseph Cheng, Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong; Sieu Khuu, School of Optometry, University of New South Wales, Australia
We will show how the perceived direction of self-motion specified by the motion signal in a radial flow pattern (like in Star Trek movies) can be biased toward the center of a static radial form pattern composed of dot pairs. Furthermore, we will show how this bias can be reduced by reducing the global form coherence of the static radial form pattern.

Spinning Ellipses

Gideon Paul Caplovitz and Kyle Killebrew, University of Nevada Reno
Who says spinning an ellipse has to be boring?

The disembodied eye

Jordan Suchow and Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam, and Ken Nakayama, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
When looking at an upside down face, the eyes eventually appear to flip right-side up, giving the eery impression that they no longer belong to the face. The same is true of a mouth.

The Emotion Mirror: A Novel Intervention for Facial Expression Production and Perception Training for Children with Autism

Dave Deriso and Josh Susskind, UCSD; Jim Tanaka, UV; John Herrington and Bob Schultz, CHOP; Marian Bartlett, UCSD
We will present a novel use of machine learning and computer vision to aid in the treatment of autism. This demo is an intervention game where cartoon characters mimic facial expressions in real-time to improve the ability of children to produce basic emotion facial expressions.

The Flickering Wheel

Rodika Sokoliuk and Ramakrishna Chakravarthi, Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Toulouse
We will present a new dynamic illusion: The Flickering Wheel, a way to visually experience your brain oscillations. The static circular stimulus, built up of alternating black and white sectors, elicits a flickering sensation in its center which is caused by an interaction between eye movements and alpha oscillations.

The Floating Light

Martin Rolfs, New York University, Department of Psychology; Maryam Vaziri Pashkam, Harvard University, Vision Sciences Laboratory
A bright object in a dim frame dramatically shifts position when both are set in motion, breaking the law of common fate. In a three-dimensional setup, either the stimulus set or the observers will move. We will also illustrate disturbingly strong versions of the related Hess-, Pulfrich- and flash-lag-effects.

The Incredible Shrinking Peter Illusion

Stuart Anstis, UC San Diego
Reverse phi makes an image of Pete Thompson continually shrink while SA continually expands, though neither changes in mean size. Pete Thompson will dobtless award this his Viperlib prize.

The Leaning Tower Illusion: a 2D illusion?

Aaron Johnson and Bruno Richard, Concordia University
The Leaning Tower Illusion occurs when an image of a tower appears lopsided when placed next to a copy of itself. In this demo, we show that the illusion does not exist when real towers are placed next to each other, but does exist when viewed on a 2D screen.

The Speed Illusion of Trains

James Lu and Anthony Chen, University High School
In this demo, we show that if you have two objects moving at the same speed, the closer one will appear to be moving faster than the one further away.

Transilience Induced Blindness and Selective Filling-in of Artificial Scotoma

Seiichiro Naito, Makoto Katsumura and Ryo Shohara, Human and Information Science, Tokai University, Japan
The large MIB target figure would disappear. We devised the novel inducing stimuli. The MIB target has been identified as the perceptual or artificial scotoma. We found that any uniform color would fill-in, Neither simple line segments passing under the targets nor fine textures could never fill in.

Unpredictable slopes

Elnaz Nouri, University of Southern California; Mouna Attarha, The University of Iowa
Careful with the slopes! Here, we will show you that surfaces arranged in particular ways trick the visual system into miscalculating the flow of water. Come over to learn why.

Vectorized LITE

Kenneth Brecher, Boston University
We will show fully vectorized images we have constructed based on visually striking art works, such as Isia Leviant’s ‘’Enigma’’, Bridget Riley’s ‘’Fall’’ and Reginald Neal’s ‘’Squares of Two’’ where sharp, large format printing enhances the psychophysical phenomena. The PDF’s can be found at: http://lite.bu.edu.

What do deforming shapes teach us about 3-D structure-from-motion?

Anshul Jain and Qasim Zaidi, Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY College of Optometry
You will judge the aspect ratios of flexing and rigid 3-D cylinders to test your ability to extract structure from motion without rigidity assumptions. You will also see how rotating symmetric cylinders around oblique axes creates asymmetric percepts corresponding to asymmetries in the image velocity pattern.

What right angle bias?

Lydia Maniatis, American University
The impression of pictorial depth is often attributed to a bias for perceiving right angles and/or parallel lines. This demo was designed to show that a figure may produce depth effects despite the absence of both of these features in the percept.

Monday, May 14, 2012, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Buffet Dinner: 7:00 – 9:00 pm, Vista Ballroom, Sunset & Vista Decks, and Mangrove Pool
Demos: 7:30 – 10:00 pm, Royal Palm 4-5, Acacia Meeting Rooms, Cypress

Please join us Monday evening for the 10th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year, Gideon Caplovitz, Arthur Shapiro, Dejan Todorovic, and Maryam Vaziri Pashkam are co-curators for Demo Night.

Exciting News: Two prizes will be given to the best demos, sponsored by the journal Perception. Please don’t forget to find Pete Thompson, Tim Meese, or Amye Kenall for a ballot and vote.

A buffet dinner is served in the Vista Ballroom and on the Sunset Deck and Mangrove Pool area. Demos are located upstairs on the ballroom level in the Royal Palm 4-5 and Acacia Meeting Rooms.

Some exhibitors have also prepared special demos for Demo Night.

Demo Night is free for all registered VSS attendees. Meal tickets are not required, but you must wear your VSS badge for entry to the Dinner Buffet. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome to attend the demos but must purchase a ticket for dinner. You can register your guests at any time during the meeting at the VSS Registration Desk, located in the Royal Palm Foyer. A desk will also be set up at the entrance to the dinner in the Vista Ballroom at 6:30 pm.

Guest prices:  Adults: $25, Youth (6-12 years old): $10, Children under 6: free

The Looking Glass Motion Effect

Kenneth Brecher, Boston University
A new subjective motion effect utilizing recently designed fully vectorized color images will be displayed. This effect is based on one of 9 screen prints originally created in 1966 by British artist Peter Sedgley that he called the ‘’Looking Glass Suite”.

The phantom spokes illusion

Jeffrey Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center
When a regular array of small bright dots is rotated in the image plane, dark ephemeral spoke-like bands are seen, radiating from the instantaneous center of rotation. The effect is easily observed with a common plastic diffusing sheet for florescent lighting.

Spin the wheel and lose the spatial relationships.

Alex Holcombe, University of Sydney
With arrays of colored discs moving together, at very slow speeds it is easy to see which are adjacent. Up the speed to discover that at which you no longer can perceive the spatial relationship among the discs. Is this speed the same as your attentional tracking speed limit?

The Money Business Illusion

Anthony S. Barnhart, Arizona State University
The Money Business Illusion demonstrates how time-tested techniques employed in stage entertainment can be infused with standard psychophysical tasks from the laboratory to create ecologically valid stimuli for empirical research.

The Spinning Chair of Motion Perception

Kyle Gagnon, Michael Geuss, Jonathan Butner, Tom Malloy, Jeanine Stefanucci, University of Utah
We present a visual display of a flow of black and white dots. The dots appear to flow like a wave in one direction. After spinning in a chair in order to alter natural eye movements, we show that the dots appear to flow in the opposite direction. We suggest that spinning in the chair changes the natural frequency of eye movements, changing the coupling ratio between the eye movements and the retinal image, ultimately changing the direction and rate of perceived motion.

The Anorthoscope and Kinetic Anamorphosis

Patrick Mor, Gideon Paul Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno
Here we bring to life this classic apparatus and perceptual effect developed by Joseph Plateau in the 1830s.

Continuous Transilience Induced Blindness

Seiichiro Naito, Makoto Katsumura & Ryo Shohara, Human and Information Science, Tokai University
We demonstrate the Continuous Transilience Induced Blindness, an enhanced variant of Motion-Induced Blindness (MIB).

Efficiency of motion perception from dynamic stereo cues

Anshul Jain, Qasim Zaidi, Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY College of Optometry
Observers will be able to measure how efficient they are (compared to an optimal observer) at discriminating global rotation direction of a deforming disparity-defined 3D shape when the local motions are entirely in depth (orthogonal to rotation), plus when local motions are in the direction opposite to global shape rotation.

Beuchet Chair

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, University of York
Make your friends look small – just sit them on the Beuchet chair. The demonstration is akin to the Ames room but much more compact. And our version is portable and ideal for classroom demonstrations.

Eyeglass Reversal

Songjoo Oh, Department of Psychology, Seoul National University
People are familiar with stimuli such as the Necker Cube that lead to perceptual reversals. Unfortunately, constructing physical versions of such stimuli can be challenging. I will show that one’s own eyeglasses are a very convenient object for experiencing perceptual reversals. In this demonstration, a pair of regular eyeglasses that are viewed inwardly are perceived as placed outwardly. Please bring your own eyeglasses and enjoy the fun!

The Magic Wand Illusion

Christopher Tyler, Smith-Kettlewell
The dynamic wand effect is the revelation of an image that is the same color as its background through wiping an object underneath it. It is a strictly dynamic illusion that requires the integration of the revealed contours over time in order to resolve the integrated image structure.

A display blank triggers a reversal of KDE

Masahiro Ishii, Sapporo City University
When a set of randomly positioned dots moves on a screen with motion paths that are projections of rigid 3D motion, we perceive an impression of depth. The object appears to reverse in depth at odd intervals, regardless of the consciousness. We demonstrate that a presentation blank triggers a reversal.

Key object feature dimensions modulate texture filling-in

Chao Chaang Mao, National Yang-Ming University, Institute of Neuroscience and Brain Research Center, Taipei, Taiwan
In this demo, we show that filling-in is faster when the background and target textures share the same key dimension features (‘same’ condition), versus when they have opposing features (‘different’).

‘Pub Vision’

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, University of York
Simple hands-on demonstrations that you can do in the pub.

Stereopsis with one eye and a pencil

Dhanraj Vishwanath, University of St. Andrews
The impression of stereopsis is generated by viewing a photograph with one eye while fixating a pencil tip.

Controlling material appearance with spatial frequency manipulations

Martin Giesel, Qasim Zaidi, Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY College of Optometry
Observers will be able to interactively manipulate roughness, volume and thickness of fabrics and other materials by changing the energy in bands of image frequencies. They will also see how adaptation to noise filtered into specific spatial frequency bands changes the perception of corresponding material properties.

Carrots or Cheetos: Material appearance under monochromatic light

Bei Xiao, Hanhan Wei, Xiaodan Jia, Edward Adelson, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In this demo, we display translucent objects under a monochromatic light source (low-pressure sodium light) or a broad-band light source. We show that a translucent object, such as a bar of soap, looks more opaque under monochromatic light than under broad-band light. In addition, we explore how material perception of various objects is distorted under monochromatic light.

An Aftereffect Based on Texture Element Ratios

Anna Kosovicheva, Benjamin Wolfe, University of California, Berkeley
We present an aftereffect based on adaptation to the ratio of two different types of texture elements. We show the effect for textures defined by color, luminance, motion, and simple figures.

General object constancy

Yury Petrov, Jiehui Qian, Northeastern University
We will present simultaneous illusions of size, contrast, and depth created by an optic flow. The illusions manifest what we call the phenomenon of general object constancy: brain accounts for viewing distance effects in order to create a perception of the object’s true appearance, including its size, contrast, and depth profile.

Attentional influences on bi-stable afterimages

Eric Reavis, Peter J. Kohler, Peter U. Tse, Dartmouth College
Attention constantly shapes our perceptual experience. See this for yourself, as you use your attention to modulate your perception of bistable afterimages.

Touching and interpreting hallucinated patterns in dynamic visual noise

Justin Jungé, Jordan Suchow, George Alvarez, Harvard University
We present a display of dynamic colorful noise that reliably produces several illusions. The display appears to interact directly with objects held and moved in front of it, across a range of stimulus properties and viewing distances (MacKay, 1965). Even without partial occlusion, the display triggers multiple interpretations that persist for long durations and which can be influenced by attention and intention.

Lack of volumetric stereo neon spreading and top-down defeating of stereo

Eric Altschuler (New Jersey Medical School), Abigail Huang(NJMS), Elizabeth Seckel (UCSD), Alice Hon (NJMS), Xintong Li (NJMS), VS Ramachandran (UCSD)
Using stereograms defined by illusory contours we show that there is no volumetric neon spreading in stereo even though stereo illusory contours and surfaces are seen. Furthermore the stereo can be subjectively destroyed by top-down imagery; a stereo illusory pyramid can be made to lose its apex simply by seeing the whole pyramid through illusory holes (‘’swiss cheese’’).

Motion from Structure in Stereograms

Benjamin Backus, Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY College of Optometry
You’ve probably noticed this yourself: in a stereogram, objects with different binocular disparities appear to move when you move your head. Near objects move with your head, as expected from geometry. Come to our talk and then explore details of this phenomenon yourself at the demo.

Diamonds Move Forever

Oliver Flynn, Arthur Shapiro, American University
A stationary diamond appears to move continuously in a single direction. The luminance levels of the stationary background and the stationary edges that surround the diamond modulate in time. The relative phase of modulation creates motion information.

Color wagon wheels

William Kistler, Arthur Shapiro, American University
We show a series of illusions that arise when colors are added to the wagon wheel illusion. The color wagon wheel demonstrates methods for separating different motion responses, and how these responses depend on the contrast between objects, and objects and background.

Explaining Brightness illusions with Adobe Photoshop’s high pass filter

Erica Dixon, Arthur Shapiro, American University
In brightness phenomena physically identical patches have different brightness levels depending on their respective backgrounds. Here I will use Adobe Photoshop’s high pass filter to demonstrate that most of the differences observed in brightness illusions correspond to physical properties of the image once low spatial frequency content is removed.

Your Mind’s Eye

Al Seckel, Elizabeth Seckel, UC San Diego
Your Mind’s Eye is an educational application featuring perceptual illusions for both mobile and tablet platforms. Come control critical parameters thereby revealing the hidden constraints of the perceptual system in a dramatic and informative way. The application is augmented by movies of perceptual effects, both artistic and scientific. Each illusion is accompanied with explanatory text. Ideal for researchers and teachers.

Consumer Priced Immersive Virtual Reality with Kinect and Sony 3D Goggles

Michael Schaletzki, Matthias Pusch, Paul Elliott, WorldViz
Experience a new high-quality consumer priced immersive standalone VR system. Based on the WorldViz Vizard VR software, the system comes with vivid OLED display technology, 1280×720 resolution per eye, 52 degrees field-of-view, Kinect and inertial body tracking, rapid app development tools, a fun app starter kit, support & training.

VPixx 3D Survivor

Peter April, VPixx
A demonstration of 3D video projection, adapted from our own response-time game from past years. We will be handing out passive 3D glasses as people enter the room, and will be giving away prizes to the players with the fastest reaction times.

A Nomadic HMD Experience Without Carrying a Computer

Yuval Boger, Meredith Zanelotti, Sensics
We will demonstrate a battery-operated, wireless high-def HMD together with in-band head tracking driven.

Monday, May 13, 2013, 7:00 – 10:00 pm

Buffet Dinner: 7:00 – 9:00 pm,  Vista Ballroom, Sunset & Vista Decks, and Mangrove Pool
Demos: 7:30 – 10:00 pm, Royal Palm 4-5, Acacia and Cypress Meeting Rooms

Please join us Monday evening for the 11th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year, Gideon Caplovitz, Arthur Shapiro, Dejan Todorovic, and Maryam Vaziri Pashkam are co-curators for Demo Night.

A buffet dinner is served in the Vista Ballroom and on the Sunset Deck and Mangrove Pool area. Demos are located upstairs on the ballroom level in the Royal Palm 4-5 and Acacia and Cypress Meeting Rooms.

Some exhibitors have also prepared special demos for Demo Night.

Demo Night is free for all registered VSS attendees. Meal tickets are not required, but you must wear your VSS badge for entry to the Dinner Buffet. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome to attend the demos but must purchase a ticket for dinner. You can register your guests at any time during the meeting at the VSS Registration Desk, located in the Royal Palm Foyer. A desk will also be set up at the entrance to the dinner in the Vista Ballroom at 6:30 pm.

Guest prices: Adults: $25, Youth (6-12 years old): $10, Children under 6: free

3-D Depth-Inverting and Motion-Reversing Illusions

Thomas V. Papathomas, Rutgers University; Marcel DeHeer, 3-D Graphics, Amsterdam
We will project video animations of 3-D depth-inverting illusions, including the hollow-mask illusion and variations, the ‘’Exorcist’’ illusion, and various forms of reverse-perspective illusions. Generally, depth is inverted, with concavities being perceived as convexities, and vice versa. Also, the direction of rotation is reversed.

Binocular Rivalry Gets Pushy

Elan Barenholtz, Loren Kogelschatz; Dept. Psychology, Center for Complex Systems, Florida Atlantic University
Wearing red/blue 3D glasses while fixating a homogeneous background results in an interesting form of binocular rivalry: both red and blue fields appear simultaneously, with a boundary that shifts erratically, as the two eyes compete for dominance. The boundary can also be ‘pushed’, by sweeping a hand across the screen.

3-D Phenakistoscope

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone; University of York, UK
The 3-D phenakistoscope generates a moving sequence of real 3-D figures. The viewer spins a vertically oriented disk and views via a series of slits a series of figures on the other side of the disk. A mirror allows the figures to be seen and set in motion. Our model is easy to construct and will thrill your family and friends.

L-POST: A Screening Test for Assessing Perceptual Organization

Karien Torfs^1,2, Lee de-Wit, Kathleen Vancleef², Johan Wagemans²; ¹Université Catholique de Louvain, ²University Leuven
We will demonstrate the Leuven Perceptual Organization Screening Test (L-POST) in which a wide range of processes of perceptual organization are measured using a matching-to-sample task. The L-POST is freely available at www.gestaltrevision.be/tests, can be administered in 20 minutes, and has a neglect friendly version. Try it yourself!

Photo to Painting Techniques

Krista Ehinger, MIT; Eric Altschuler, New Jersey Medical School
Turn your photo into a painted portrait! We demonstrate how two classes of computer vision algorithms (top-down morphable 3D models and bottom-up texture synthesis) can be used to replicate the portrait painting techniques of different artists in history.

Reflections on a True Mirror

Jason Haberman, Jordan Suchow; Harvard University
Common mirrors reflect an image of the viewer that is flipped in the plane of depth. Therefore, there is a mismatch between what the viewer sees and what the rest of the world sees. With a non-reversing (i.e., ‘’true’’) mirror, a pair of angled mirrors creates an image that reflects the true self — the image as seen by others or in photographs.

Adaptation of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex Using Prism Goggles: An Easy and Compelling Classroom Demonstration

Carl E. Granrud, Michael Todd Allen; University of Northern Colorado
Toss balls into a trashcan while wearing prism goggles that alter the angle of visual inputs. After several misses, accuracy generally improves. When students remove the goggles, they typically miss the trashcan, but in the direction opposite to their initial misses. This demonstrates adaptation of the vestibulo-ocular reflex.

VPixx 3D Survivor Showdown

Peter April, Jean-Francois Hamelin,Stephanie-Ann Seguin; VPixx Technologies
An exciting game in which the PROPixx 500Hz 3D DLP projector presents dynamic 3D images, and pairs of players with passive 3D glasses compete for the fastest response times. VPixx will be awarding prizes to the players with the quickest reflexes!

Virtual Reality Immersion with Cow Cost Head Mounted Displays

Matthias Pusch, Charlotte Li; WorldViz, LLC
Get fully immersed with a research quality Virtual Reality system. Based on the WorldViz Vizard VR software, the system comes with a 3D head-mounted display, motion tracking, rapid application development tools, application starter kit, support & training. Walk through high-fidelity virtual environments in full scale and fully control visual input.

Rotating Columns: Relating Structure-From-Motion, Accretion/Deletion, And Figure/Ground

Vicky Froyen, O. Daglar Tanrikulu, Jacob Feldman, Manish Singh; Rutgers University
When constant textural motion is added to figure-ground displays, the ground regions are perceived as moving as a single surface. Surprisingly, the figural regions are perceived as 3D volumes rotating in depth (like rotating columns)—despite the fact that the textural motion is not consistent with 3D rotation.

The Fuse-A-Face iPad App

Jim Tanaka Buyun Xu, Bonnie Heptonstall, Simen Hagen; University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Have you ever wondered what you would look like with Angelina Jolie’s lips or Johnny Depp’s eyes? Take a self-photo with the iPad camera and have fun combining your face with face of your favorite celebrities. Then post your face mash-up to your Facebook page or the VSS Face Gallery.

Fabricating Transparent Liquid From Visual Motion

Takahiro Kawabe Kazushi Maruya, Shin’ya Nishida; NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation
We will present an illusion in which an impression of transparent liquid is created from band-passed ‘vector’ spatiotemporal distortion of a static image. We also show that translating the image distortion produces an illusion of the flow of transparent liquid, and even triggers a motion aftereffect in the direction opposite to the apparent liquid flow.

The Influence of Local and Global Motion on Shifts in Perceived Position

Peter J. Kohler, Peter U. Tse; Dartmouth College
The perceived position of a briefly presented stimulus can be shifted in the direction of nearby motion. We present several novel versions of this phenomenon, and demonstrate that local and global motion can both have an influence on the direction of the shift in perceived position.

Some Novel Spatiotemporal Boundary Formation Phenomena

Gennady Erlikhman, Phil Kellman; University of California, Los Angeles
We present several new kinds of spatiotemporal boundary formation phenomena. In one set of demos, we show SBF with non-rigid objects of changing size, shape, and orientation. In another, we show that contour formation via SBF can serve as inputs to conventional illusory contour formation.

Color Man Walking

Gi Yeul Bae, Zheng Ma; Johns Hopkins University
A gradual color change along an iso-luminant color space creates a non-uniform percept of color change rate. Background luminance is a strong determinant for this rhythmical percept. We demonstrate this phenomenon using a variety of geometric arrangements of colored objects.

Rotation or Deformation? A Surprising Consequence of the Kinetic Depth Effect

Attila Farkas, Dr. Alen Hajnal; University of Southern Mississippi
Present illusion reveals a trade-off between several cognitive assumptions. One such bias considers the rigidity of the depicted object. A human head is considered to be a rigid object, and therefore is not expected to be seen as spontaneously changing its shape by stretching or shrinking. Stretching will become rotation.

The Garden Path Illusion – Finding Equiluminance Instantly

Bruce Bridgeman, Sabine Blaesi; University of California, Santa Cruz
My garden has flickering roses on one side and flickering foliage on the other. In the middle runs a yellow garden path without flicker. Two panels with opposite brightness gradients and different colors alternate above the chromatic flicker fusion rate; where their brightnesses match, a steady band appears. Instant equiluminance!

Identifying Nonrigid 3D Shapes From Motion Cues

Anshul Jain, Qasim Zaidi; Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY College of Optometry
Observers will perform a shape-identification task on novel deforming and rigid shape-from-motion stimuli, which will demonstrate that humans do not make a rigidity assumption to extract 3D shape. We will also demonstrate that observers’ performance does not deteriorate in the periphery if the stimuli size is adjusted for cortical magnification.

Dynamic Illusory Size Contrast

Christopher D. Blair, Kyle Killebrew, Gideon P. Caplovitz, University of Nevada Reno; Ryan Mruczek, Swarthmore College
We demonstrate a new illusion in which dynamic changes in the size of one object can induce perceived dynamic changes in another moving object of constant size.

Surface Flows

Romain Vergne, Université Joseph Fourier; Pascal Barla, Inria
In this demo, we will present two novel image deformation operators that produce the illusion of surface shape depicted through textures (e.g., pigmentation) or reflections/refractions (e.g. off glossy/translucent materials). These deformations work in real-time in our prototype software and can be controlled accurately directly in the image.

The Beuchet Chair

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone; University of York, U.K.
Back by Popular Demand! In the Beuchet chair we see two part of the chair (legs and seat) as belonging together even though they are at different distances from us. Consequently figures at different distances are perceived as being at the same distance. The more distant person appears tiny and the closer figure huge.

Tusi or Not Tusi

Alex Rose-Henig, Arthur Shapiro; American University
We will present several examples of surprising spatial organization. Some examples show that linear elemental motion can produce circular global motion (we call this Tusi motion, from Nasir al-Din al-Tusi,1201-1276), and other examples show that circular elemental motion can produce linear global motion (we call this not-Tusi motion).

Leonardo da Vinci Age Regression

Christopher Tyler, Smith-Kettlewell Institute
Although only one secure portrait of Leonardo da Vinci is know, an array of putative portraits and self-portraits of Leonardo da Vinci are aligned and shown in inverse age sequence to provide a convincing age regression back to his infancy.

Monday, May 19, 2014, 6:00 – 10:00 pm

Beach BBQ: 6:00 – 8:00 pm, Beachside Sun Decks,
Demos: 7:00 – 10:00 pm, Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, & Spotted Curlew

Please join us Monday evening for the 12th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year’s Demo Night will be organized and curated by Gideon Caplovitz, University of Nevada Reno; Arthur Shapiro, American University; Dejan Todorovic, University of Belgrade and Karen Schloss, Brown University.

A Beach BBQ is served on the Beachside Sun Decks. Demos are located in Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, & Spotted Curlew.

Demo Night is free for all registered VSS attendees. Meal tickets are not required, but you must wear your VSS badge for entry to the Beach BBQ. Guests and family members of all ages are welcome to attend the demos but must purchase a ticket for dinner. You can register your guests at any time during the meeting at the VSS Registration Desk, located on the Grand Palm Colonnade. A desk will also be set up on the Seabreeze Terrace at 6:30 pm.

Guest prices: Adults: $25, Youth (6-12 years old): $10, Children under 6: free

Biological Motion

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, University of York
A real-time demonstration of point-light biological motion. Walk, jump, dance in front of the sensor and see your point-light display. Using an Xbox Kinect sensor (approx $50) and our free software you can produce this effect for yourselves.

Audiovisual Hallucinations

Parag Mital, Dartmouth College
Audiovisual scene synthesis attempts to simultaneously learn and match existing representations of proto-objects in the ongoing auditory and visual scene. The synthesized scene is presented through virtual reality goggles and headphones.

Phenomenology of Flicker-Defined Motion

Jeff Mulligan, NASA Ames Research Center; Scott Stevenso, University of Houston College of Optometry
Flicker-defined motion produces a number of surprises: a target that disappears when pursued; a target that appears to move in jumps when moved continuously; a persistent ‘’trail’’ that disappears when the target is pursued. These effects and more will be presented.

Thatcherise Your Face

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, Tim Andrews, University of York
The Thatcher illusion is one of the best-loved perceptual phenomena. here you will have the opportunity to see yourself ‘thatcherised’ in real time. And you can have a still version of your thatcherised face as a souvenir.

The Ever-Popular Beuchet Chair

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, Tim Andrews, University of York
The Beuchet chair baffles because the two separate parts of the chair are seen as belonging together. Although at different distances, the two parts have appropriate sizes to create the retinal image of a single chair at some intermediate distance. The two figures are now perceived as being at the same distance away and therefore size constancy does not operate. Additionally the far figure must be tiny to fit on the big seat of the chair and the near figure must be huge.

The Wandering Circles

Christopher D. Blair, Lars Strother and Gideon P. Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno
Physically stationary flickering shapes appear to drift randomly when viewed peripherally.

Dynamic Ebbinghaus

Ryan E.B. Mruczek, Christopher D. Blair, Gideon P. Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno
Come see the Ebbinghaus Illusion as you’ve never seen it before! Watch the central circle grow and shrink before your eyes as we add a dynamic twist to this classic illusion.

To Deform or Not to Deform: Illusory Deformations of a Static Object Triggered by the Light Projection of Motion Signals

Takahiro Kawabe, Masataka Sawayama, Kazushi Maruya, Shin’ya Nishida, NTT Communication Sciences Laboratories, Japan
We will demonstrate that projecting image motion through a video projector can deform the apparent shape of static objects printed on the paper.

Strobowheel

Anna Kosovicheva, Benjamin Wolfe, Wesley Chaney, Allison Yamanashi Leib, Alina Liberman, University of California, Berkeley
We present a modified phenakistoscope in which we use a strobe light to create animated images on a spinning disc. Viewers can adjust the frequency of a strobe light to change the animation, or make the image on the disc appear to spin backwards or stand still.

Polygonization Effect

Kenzo Sakurai, Tohoku Gakuin University
Prolonged viewing of a circular shape in peripheral vision produces polygonal shape perception of the circle itself. This shape distortion illusion can be induced in a short period by alternately presenting a circle and its inward gradation pattern.

The Saccadic Smear

Mark Wexler, Marianne Duyke, Thérèse Collins, CRNS & Université Paris Descartes
When a stimulus appears only during a saccade, you see it smeared. If it also appears before the saccade or stays on afterwards, the smear is masked. We demonstrate this retro 1970s-style phenomenon using a portable eye tracker and several LEDs. Wait a minute, where did that smear go?

Bistable Double Face Illusion

Sarah Cormiea, Anna Shafer-Skelton; Harvard University
Come visit our demo and take home an illusion made with your own face. We’ll take two photos and combine them to create a bistable illusion of a forward looking face that incongruously still has a profile.

Expansion/Contraction Blindness

Koshke Takahashi, Katsumi Watanabe, The University of Tokyo
We show a novel striking visual illusion. When an object filled with black and white color makes rotation and zoom on a gray background, you will never see the expansion and contraction.

Rotating Columns

Vicky Froyen, Daglar Tanrikulu, Rutgers University
Adding textural motion to classic figure-ground displays reveals complex interactions between accretion-deletion and geometric figure-ground cues. We demonstrate cases where static geometry overrides standard depth from accretion-deletion. Thus moving regions are perceived as figural and rotating in 3D, despite the textural motion being linear and thus inconsistent with 3D rotation.

Infinite Regress Etch-a-Sketch

Nika Adamian, Patrick Cavanagh, Matteo Lisi, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris V Descartes; Peter U. Tse, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris V Descartes, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College
A new infinite regress illusion (Tse & Hsieh, 2006) synchronizes changes in the path of a gabor with changes in its internal motion. This produces large, stable differences between perceived and physical location. Illusory shapes or orientations can be created to show dramatic dissociations between action and perception.

News from the Freiburg Vision Test

Michael Bach, University Eye Center, Freiburg Germany
“FrACT” with a history of over 20 years was validated in a number of studies and is widely employed – in 2013 it was cited in 40 papers that used FrACT. Its ongoing active development is often driven by user requests. I will demonstrate new features.

Chromatic Interocular Switch Rivalry

Jens Hofman Christiansen, University of Copenhagen; Steven Shevell, University of Chicago; Anthony D’Antona, University of Texas at Austin
Using a haploscope, a differently colored circle is presented to each eye in the same part of the visual field (binocular color rivalry). When the rivalrous colors are exchanged between the eyes at 3 Hz, the percept is not flickering colors but instead slow alternation between the two colors.

Eye Movements and Troxler Fading

Romain Bachy, Qasim Zaidi, Graduate Center for Vision Research, SUNY Optometry
Observers will be able to use a time-varying procedure to see that fixational eye-movements control the magnitude and speed of adaptation for foveal and peripheral vision. The stimuli will isolate single classes of retinal ganglion cells and demonstrate the effects of flicker and blur on adaptation of each class.

The Magical Misdirection of Attention in Time

Anthony S. Barnhart, Northern Arizona University
When we think of ‘’misdirection,’’ we typically think of a magician drawing attention away from a spatial location. However, magicians also misdirect attention in time through the creation of ‘’off-beats,’’ moments of suppressed attention. The ‘’striking vanish’’ illusion, where a coin disappears when tapped with a pen, exploits this phenomenon.

Applying Temporal Masking For Bandwidth Reduction in HD Video Streaming

Velibor Adzic, Hari Kalva, Florida Atlantic University
We demonstrate some aspects of temporal masking in natural video sequences. Specifically, application of backward temporal masking and motion masking in visually lossless video compression.

Water Flowing Upward

Wenxun Li, Leonard Martin, Columbia University; Ethel Matin, Long Island University – Post
See Water Flowing Uphill!

Lower in Contrast, Higher in Numerosity

Quan Lei, Adam Reeves, Northeastern University
There appear to be many more light gray than white disks, and many more dark gray than black disks, when equal numbers of the disks are intermingled on a medium gray background. Intermingling is critical: disks separated into two regions match in perceived numerosity.

The Shape-Shifting Cylinder

Lore Thaler, Durham University, UK
We present a novel demonstration of the effects of optical texture and binocular disparity on shape perception. You will see a real, physical cylinder. As you alternate your view from monocular to binocular the shape of the cylinder shifts, i.e. the tip of the cylinder appears to move from left to right (or vice versa).

Virtual Reality Immersion with the Full HD Oculus Rift Head Mounted Displays

Michael Schaletzki, Matthias Pusch, Charlette Li, WorldViz
Get fully immersed with a research quality, consumer component based Virtual Reality system. Powered by the WorldViz Vizard VR software, the system comes with the Oculus Rift HD, motion tracking, rapid application development tools, application starter kit, support & training. Walk through high-fidelity virtual environments in full scale and fully control visual input.

What Happens to a Shiny 3D Object in a Rotating Environment?

Steven A. Cholewiak, University of Gissen, Germany; Gizem Kucukoglu, New York University
A mirrored object reflects a distorted world. The distortions depend on the object’s surface and act as points of correspondence when it moves. We demonstrate how the perceived speed of a rotating mirrored object is affected by rotation of the environment and present an interesting case of perceived non-rigid deformation.

Alternating Apparent Motion in Random Dot Displays

Nicolas Davidenko, Jacob Smith, Yeram Cheong, University of California, Santa Cruz
A succession of random dot displays gives rise to a percept of coherent, global, apparent motion. The perceived apparent motion is typically alternating (flipping direction on each frame) and vertical, although the direction can be easily manipulated by suggestion.

An Ames-room-like Box with a Ball Inside

Ryuichi Yokota, Masahiro Ishii, Shoko Yasuoka, Sapporo University
This is a miniature overturned Ames room with a physically-slanted base. The top face has a hole to peep inside. The box is designed to have an apparently-horizontal base and contains a ball. One can experience unnatural feelings when they manipulate to roll the ball across the base.

VPixx Response-Time Survivor

Peter April, Jean-Francois Hamelin, Stephanie-Ann Seguin, VPixx Technologies
VPixx will be demonstrating our PROPixx DLP projector refreshing at 1440Hz. The demo is a fun game in which we measure your reaction time to cross-modal audiovisual stimuli. Do it fast, and win a prize! This year’s demo has a surprise twist which you will definitely want to see.

Moving Barber-Pole Illusion

George Sperling, Peng Sun, Charles Chubb, University of California, Irvine
When an entire vertically oriented barber pole itself moves laterally, and it is viewed peripherally, the perceived motion direction is vertically upward, even though the physical Fourier, end-stop, and feature motion directions, and the foveally perceived motion direction are all diagonal.

SWYE! Surfing With Your Eyes: The Beachiest Illusion Out There!

Alejandro Lleras, Simona Buetti, University of Illinois
This ‘’You-Should-Really-Try-Doing-It-On-The-Beach-Sometime-You-Know?’’ visual illusion is Ok when seen on video… a run-of-the-mill bi-stable stimulus. But when experienced at the beach, it becomes a multimodal illusion where (while stationary) you feel as if you were gliding at several feet per second over the water. Your trips to the beach will never be the same!

The New Synopter

M.W.A. Wijntjes, S.C. Pont, Perceptual Intelligence Lab, Delft University of Technology
With two mirrors it is possible to optically juxtapose the location of both eyes, resulting in disparities that are similar to infinitely distant points. Although invented about a 100 year ago, the synopter yields a percept that is still difficult to explain: that of an illusory 3D picture.

Monday, May 18, 2015, 6:00 – 10:00 pm

Beach BBQ: 6:00 – 8:00 pm, Beachside Sun Decks
Demos: 7:00 – 10:00 pm, Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, Spotted Curlew and Jacaranda Hall

Please join us Monday evening for the 13th Annual VSS Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year’s Demo Night will be organized and curated by Gideon Caplovitz, University of Nevada Reno; Arthur Shapiro, American University; Dejan Todorovic, University of Belgrade and Karen Schloss, Brown University.

A Beach BBQ is served on the Beachside Sun Decks. Demos are located in Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, & Spotted Curlew.

Demos are free for all registered VSS attendees and their families and guests. The Beach BBQ is free for attendees, but YOU MUST WEAR YOUR BADGE to receive dinner. Guests and family members must purchase a ticket for the Beach BBQ. You can register your guests at any time at the VSS Registration Desk, located in the Grand Palm Colonnade. A desk will also be set up on the Seabreeze Terrace at 6:30 pm.

Guest prices: Adults: $25, Youth (6-12 years old): $10, Children under 6: free

#theDress: An explanation based on simple spatial filter

Arthur Shapiro, Oliver Flynn, Erica Dixon, American University
Individual differences in the perception of #theDress have generated numerous hypotheses regarding color constancy. Here we demonstrate that the effects of simulated illumination on #theDress can be negated with a simple spatial filter (See Shapiro & Lu 2011). Could the #theDress phenomena indicate variation in a spatial gain control?

#theDress: A Color Constancy Color Controversy

Rosa Lafer-Sousa, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Bevil Conway, Wellesley College, MIT
A photograph of a dress that drives two distinct color-percepts recently went viral. We believe the two percepts arise because the brain is guessing about the ambiguous illuminant (blueish-or-yellowish?). We show that the identical dress in two unambiguous contexts can yield the two distinct percepts that divided the Internet.

A Rotating Square Becomes Both Non-Rigid and Non-Uniform

Harald Ruda, Guillaume Riesen, Northeastern University
A simple white square, rotating around its center has edges that become non-rigid for a range of speeds. In addition, a pattern of luminance variation in the shape of a darker cross also becomes apparent with rotation.

Adaptive and Gaze Contingent Contrast Sensitivity Testing

Edward Ryklin, Ryklin Software, Inc.
Quickly obtain your Contrast Sensitivity Function Curve by simply gazing at a series of dynamically presented Gabor patches. Generate a complete CSF curve in about 2 minutes.

Afterimages Foil Visual Search

Guillaume Riesen, Harald Ruda, Northeastern University
Visual search performance can be impacted by afterimages from previously fixated stimuli. Can you find the brightest target after looking at the adaptation stimulus, or will you be fooled by its afterimages?

Ambiguous Garage Roof

Kokichi Sugihara, Meiji University
A roof of a garage appears to be quite different when it is seen from two special viewpoints. The two viewpoints are realized simultaneously by a mirror. Even though we know that we are seeing the same object, our brains do not correct our inconsistent perception.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue – Player Immersion with Tobii Eye Tracking

Ken Gregory, Joanna Fiedler, Tobii Technology, Inc.
With Tobii eye tracking integration into Assassin’s Creed Rogue™, characters behavior is influenced by eye contact like in real life. Aim your weapon where you look while running in another direction. Make your games become deeply immersive, faster and more intense by adding eye tracking to traditional controls and game play.

Attention Beyond Pixels – Bridging Machines and Humans

Qi Zhao, Chengyao Shen, Xun Huang, National University of Singapore
We will present an interactive demo to show human-like gaze prediction in natural scenes that effectively bridges the semantic gap. Users can input new images from the Internet or taken using mobile devices on the spot, and see how it predicts where humans look.

Biological Motion: is that really me?

Andre Gouws, Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, University of York
A real-time demonstration of point-light biological motion. Walk, jump, dance in front of the sensor and see your point-light display. Using an Xbox Kinect sensor (approx $50), watch how we tweak some simple settings that can make apparent changes to your physical build, gender and even mood!

Blur photographs by light projection

Takahiro Kawabe, Shin’ya Nishida, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan
We demonstrate that it is possible to make real photographs printed on a paper apparently blurred by means of the projection of luminance patterns.

Can you read without your macula? A 1440Hz gaze-contingent paradigm

Peter April, Jean-Francois Hamelin, Danny Michaud, Stephanie-Ann Seguin, VPixx Technologies
How well could you read if you developed macular degeneration? VPixx Technologies will be demonstrating a 1440Hz gaze contingent display, using our PROPixx DLP projector refreshing at 1440Hz, and our TRACKPixx high speed binocular eye tracker. The gaze contingent paradigm will simulate a scotoma in your central visual field. Can you still read?

DPI precision eye drawings

Warren Ward, Ward Technical Consulting
Showing, by accurate eye tracking data, that we don’t really know our eye position. Chart recorder drawings will be demonstrated using real-time eye position.

Glow Toggled by Shape

Minjung Kim, New York University and York University, Laurie Wilcox, Dr. Richard Murray, York University
We rendered a blobby, Lambertian disc under purely diffuse light. From the front, the disc looks like an ordinary, solid, white object. However, as the disc rotates, revealing its underside, the disc takes a translucent appearance, and appears to glow.

Modulation of line length judgment of Vertical Horizontal illusion by mathematical observation

Ayane Murai, Masahiro Ishii, Sapporo City University
A stimulus that consists of two lines forming an inverted-T shape creates an illusion. One can mentally divide the linked lines into two disconnected lines, then rotate and translate one of them to compare. Our demo shows that the observers underestimate the length of a vertical line with this observation.

Motion parallax: Putting a Wii bit of depth in your world

Andre Gouws, Peter Thompson, University of York
Using just $20 worth of hardware (a Nintendo Wii remote and infrared LEDs), we will demonstrate that a simple spatial transformation of multiple 2D objects on a screen, relative to the tracked movements of an observer, can produce a striking sensation of scene depth and 3D virtual reality.

Reflections of the environment distort perceived 3D shape

Steven A. Cholewiak, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, Gizem Küçükoğlu, Department of Psychology, New York University
We will showcase how a specular object’s image is dependent upon the way the reflected environment interacts with the the object’s geometry and how its perceived shape depends upon motion and the frequency content of the environment. Demos include perceived non-rigid deformation of shape and changes in material percept.

Reverse Stroop Battle

Caterina Ripamonti, Jakob Thomassen, Cambridge Research Systems Ltd.
Compete against your colleagues in the Reverse Stroop Battle. Two players will compete at the same time to determine who responds quickest to an identical set of stimuli presented simultaneously on two synchronised touchscreen monitors.

Robust Size Illusion Produced by Expanding and Contracting Flow Fields

Xue Dong, The Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
We observe a new illusion that the positions of radially moving dots, which moved within an imaginary annular window, appear shifted in the opposite direction of motion. The apparent size of the inner annular boundary shrank during the dots’ expanding phase and dilated during the contracting phase.

Selective stimulation of penumbral cones to visualize retinal blood vessels

Manuel Spitschan, Geoffrey K. Aguirre, David H. Brainard, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
In 1819, Johann Purkinje described how a moving light source that displaces the shadow of the retinal blood vessels to adjacent cones can produce the entopic percept of a branching tree. We demostrate a novel method for producing a similar percept. We use a device that mixes 56 narrowband primaries under computer control, in conjunction with the method of silent substitution, to present observers with a spectral modulation that selectively targets penumbral cones in the shadow of the retinal blood vessels. Such a modulation elicits a clear Purkinje-tree percept.

Star Wars Scroll Illusion

Arthur Shapiro, Oliver Flynn, American University
The seventh episode of the Star Wars saga will be released later this year. It might be of interest to note that Kingdom’s ‘’Leaning Tower Illusion’’ can also be created with the scrolling text shown at the beginning of the Star Wars movies.

stimBOLD, Simulation from Visual Stimulus to BOLD

Mark Schira, School of Psychology, University of Wollongong
We have developed a stimBOLD toolbox that allows generating a prediction of measured BOLD responses from and arbitrary video input within 5-10 minutes. I is aimed for experimental planning and teaching such as providing a hands on experience of retinotopic mapping.

Stroboscopic Ping-Pong

Brought to you by VSS and the Demo Night Committee
The title speaks for itself. Come test your skills against the vision-community’s finest in the ultimate ping-pong challenge!

Thatcherise Your Face

Andre Gouws, Peter Thompson, Mladen Sormaz, University of York
Come and see a real-time demonstration of this ever-popular perceptual phenomenon. Have your own face “thatcherised” in real time, take away a still version of your thatcherised face as a souvenir, and enter the prize competition for the “most-thatcherise-able” face of VSS 2015.

The amazing ever popular Beuchet chair

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, Tim Andrews, University of York
Once again we are bringing the Beuchet chair, an old favourite at Demo night. This year’s chair is a new and improved design! The Beuchet chair is a thought-provoking demonstration of one of the problems our visual system has to solve – the interpretation of our eyes’ 2-D images of a 3-D world. The images of distant objects must be small but we still see them as their real size thanks to ‘size constancy’. The chair breaks size constancy by providing cues that two people at very different distances are actually at the same distance. Get your photo taken with a friend….

The Blue/Black and Gold/White Dress Pavillion

Michael Rudd, University of Washington; Maria Olkkonen, University of Pennsylvania; Bei Xiao, American University; Annette Werner, University of Tubingen; Anya Hurlbert, Newcastle University
The infamous color-switching dress will be viewed in person under a variety of spectral illumination conditions to test some hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the phenomena. The dress demo will be supplemented by additional demos of materials seen under different illuminants, and by photos illustrating color constancy phenomena.

The jumping pen illusion

Rachel Denison, Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, New York University, Zhimin Chen, Department of Psychology, Peking University; Gerrit Maus, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley
In our new “jumping pen” illusion, an object (such as a pen) appears to jump in front of an occluder when the two cross in the blind spot, due to perceptual competition between the two filled-in percepts. The perceptual consequences of this illusory depth ordering can include surprising size illusions.

The mind-writing pupil

Sebastiaan Mathot, Jean-Baptiste Melmi, Lotje van der Linden, Aix-Marseille University, France, Stefan Van der Stigchel, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Are you ready to write with your mind? In this demo, we show how you can decode the focus of covert visual attention through pupillometry. Using this technique, you can select letters from a virtual keyboard by covertly attending to them.

The Pulfrich Solidity Illusion

Brent Strickland, CNRS Institut Jean Nicod; LPP
I will present a modified version of the double Pulfrich pendulum illusion (Wilson & Robinson, 1986). A pendulum appears to swing on an (illusory) elliptical path through a solid wooden beam! This demonstrates that object solidity has a relatively low priority relative to spatiotemporal motion cues in visual processing.

The shrunken finger illusion: Unseen sights can make your finger feel shorter

Vebjørn Ekroll, Bilge Sayim, Ruth van der Hallen, Johan Wagemans, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven
When you put a semi-spherical shell on your finger and view it directly from above, the shell is perceived as a complete ball due to amodal volume completion and you can experience how your finger feels shorter than normal, as if to make space for the illusory ball.

The Watercolor Effect Colors Non-flat Two Dimensional Manifolds and Three Dimensional Volumes, Neon Color Does Not

Eric L Altschuler,MD, PhD, Temple University School of Medicine, Xintong Li, Alice Hon, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Abigail Huang, Elizabeth Seckel, VS Ramachandran, UCSD
We have noticed a dramatic difference between two color spreading effects: the watercolor effect will color non-flat two dimensional manifolds and three dimensional volumes while neon color will not and only colors a flat surface.

Vision Scientists Love Drifting Gabors that Move

Gennady Erlikhman, Gideon Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno
Several demonstrations of form-motion illusions using drifting Gabor patches that have been used over the last few years. We include a novel version in which a figure appears to rotate even though the Gabors that form its outline are not changing in position or orientation, only phase.

Wide Area Walking with HMD based Virtual Reality System

Matthias Pusch, Charlotte Li, WorldViz Virtual Reality
Wide area walking in Virtual Reality: Participants experience Virtual Reality with the currently highest end head mounted displays in a large walking space with allows for natural locomotion. This creates a very high level of ‘presence’ which can be experienced with a chilling ‘fear of heights’ demo.

Monday, May 16, 2016, 6:00 – 10:00 pm

Beach BBQ: 6:00 – 8:00 pm, Beachside Sun Decks
Demos: 7:00 – 10:00 pm, Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, Spotted Curlew and Jacaranda Hall

Please join us Monday evening for the 14th Annual VSS Dinner and Demo Night, a spectacular night of imaginative demos solicited from VSS members. The demos highlight the important role of visual displays in vision research and education. This year’s Demo Night will be organized and curated by Gideon Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno; Arthur Shapiro, American University; Gennady Erlikhman, University of Nevada, Reno and Karen Schloss, Brown University.

Demos are free for all registered VSS attendees and their families and guests. The Beach BBQ is free for attendees, but YOU MUST WEAR YOUR BADGE to receive dinner. Guests and family members must purchase a ticket for the Beach BBQ. You can register your guests at any time at the VSS Registration Desk, located in the Grand Palm Colonnade. A desk will also be set up on the Seabreeze Terrace at 6:30 pm.

Guest Prices: Adults $25, Youth (6-12 years old) $10, Children under 6 are free.

The following demos will be presented from 7:00 to 10:00 pm, in Talk Room 1-2, Royal Tern, Snowy Egret, Compass, Spotted Curlew and Jacaranda Hall:

Action Adaptation Demo

Stephan de la Rosa, Laura Fademrecht, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
It is often assumed that visual action recognition is robust and hence the same action is always perceived in the same way. Contrary to this assumption, this demonstration will show that action recognition is malleable and can be transiently changed by the prolonged exposure to an action.

Audiovisual Rabbit Illusion

Monica Li, Noelle Stiles, Shinsuke Shimojo, Caltech
In general, vision dominates perception in the spatial domain, and audition in the temporal. What does one perceive when conflicting stimuli are presented in the spatial and temporal domain? We have found that audition can “postdictively” (i.e. retroactively) produce or suppress a visual flash. Stop by to view the audiovisual illusory and invisible rabbit, as well as the double flash illusion and an augmented color phi phenomenon.

Biological Motion

Andre Gouws, Tim Andrews, Rob Stone, University of York
A real-time demonstration of biological motion. Walk, jump, dance in front of the sensor and your actions are turned into a point light display, Using an X-box Kinect sensor and our free software, you can produce this effect for yourself.

Blink-Induced-Blindness During Multiple Object Tracking

Deborah J. Aks, Zenon Pylyshyn, Rutgers University; Jiye Shen, SR Research Ltd.
Your eye-blinks will trigger changes during multiple-object-tracking. Can you distinguish whether objects halt or continue to move during eye-blinks, or which objects have changed surface properties? Perceptual suppression may render you less aware than you might expect.

Contour Camouflage

Zhiheng Zhou, Lars Strother, University of Nevada, Reno
We show three types of perceptual hysteresis in which a contour either appears or disappears. First, a camouflaged contour becomes visible as the density of a background becomes insufficiently dense to maintain camouflage. Second, a contour becomes invisible as the density of a camouflaging background becomes sufficiently dense to conceal the contour. Third, a contour becomes visible against a camouflaging background and remains visible for up to several seconds and eventually fades. Interestingly, the smoothness of the contour modulates the duration of visibility or camouflage similarly in all three cases.

Co-Presence Experience with Wide Area Tracked System

Matthias Pusch, WorldViz
An interactive Virtual Reality experience will be shown in a large area tracked space.
The system will utilize Oculus hardware for one participant and HTV VIVE hardware for the other participant. The participants will be able to see representations of each other in the Virtual Space, experience interactivity and collaboration and will even be able to give each other a virtual ‘high five’, which will match the real reality ‘high five’.

Estimating Human Colour Sensors from Simple Colour Ranking

Dr. Maryam Darrodi, University of East Anglia
Let’s find out how your cones respond to a certain colour category say red. The task is to simply rank some colour pairs in terms of redness. Through “Rank-Based Spectral Estimation” technique the result will be a transformation from your cone spectral sensitivities to the hypothetical internal representations of red.

The Ever-Popular Beuchet Chair

Peter Thompson, Rob Stone, Tim Andrews, University of York
A favorite at demo Night for the past few years, the Beuchet chair is back with yet another modification. The two parts of the chair are at different distances and the visual system fails to apply size constancy appropriately. The result is people can be shrunk or made giants.

Eye Movement Induced Apparent Movement

Frédéric Gosselin, Université de Montréal
While you eye track the tip of a moving pencil, sparse bright dots flashed periodically appear to move in the direction opposite to that of the pencil at a speed inversely proportional to the flash rate.

Illusory Drifting Within a Window

Stuart Anstis, University of California San Diego; Sae Kaneko, Tohoku University
When a striped disk moves across a flickering background, the stripes paradoxically seem to move faster than the disk itself. We attribute this illusion to reverse-phi motion, which slows down the disk rim but does not affect the stripes.

An Inconsistency Between Different Ways of Matching Seen and Felt Positions

Eli Brenner, Cristina de la Malla, Irene Kuling, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
If you try to move your hidden right hand to a visible target you will end up slightly off the target. The same will happen if you do this with your left hand. Will the two hands feel aligned after they have both been matched to the same visual target?

The Money Business Illusion

Anthony Barnhart, Carthage College
The Money Business Illusion demonstrates how time-tested techniques from the theatre can be fused with standard psychophysical tasks from the laboratory to create ecologically valid stimuli for empirical research in attention and perception.

Motion Aftereffects and Grating Induction in a Blank Field

Christopher Tyler, Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
Motion aftereffects are generally understood to require a patterned test field for their induction. Following fixation an induction field of eccentricity-scaled moving bands, however, this demo exhibits strong bands of motion in a blank test field, perhaps thus corresponding to Wertheimer’s (1912) concept of “pure phi”.

Orbiting Black/White Rays Produce an ‘Illusory’ Grey Disk

Sae Kaneko, Tohoku University; Stuart Anstis, Neal Dykmans, University of California San Diego; Patrick Cavanagh, Dartmouth College; Mark Mitton, Magician
A black and white sectored pattern is moved in a circular orbit at 3—4Hz, without rotating. Result: an illusory smaller uniform gray disk centred within the sectored pattern, with diameter about equal to the orbit. Disk looks larger during dark adaptation. Explanation: Time averaging plus motion deblurring.

Perceived 3D Shape Toggles Perceived Glow

Minjung Kim, New York University, York University; Laurie M. Wilcox, Richard F. Murray, York University
What makes an object appear to emit light, or glow? We show that perceived 3D shape is critical to the appearance of glow, and that we can toggle the perceived glow on and off when motion or binocular disparity information is used to invert a surface’s perceived 3D shape.

Point-Light Motion Materials: Shattering and Splattering, Can You Guess the Substance?

Alexandra C. Schmid, Katja Doerschner, University of Giessen
Image motion in point-light walkers provides a powerful cue to biological motion. We will present simulations of point-light materials that shatter, splatter, squish, tear and flop. Can you guess what substance each object is made of? When the optical properties of the materials are revealed, find out how they interact with motion cues to alter your perception of each substance.

Real-Time Removal of Low-Spatial-Frequency Content

Laysa Hedjar, Erica Dixon, Arthur Shapiro, American University
We remove low spatial frequency content from a video camera’s real time feed. The resultant image can account for many brightness illusions and shows invariance to changes in the color of the global illumination.

Reversing Active Visual Experience: Vivid Perception During Saccades

Martin Rolfs, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; Eric Castet, CNRS & Aix-Marseille University; Sven Ohl, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Active vision relies on information reaching the eyes during fixation. Motion, blur, and temporal gaps introduced by saccadic eye movements escape our experience. Using a high-speed projection system, we will induce vivid motion perception during saccades—revealing the gaps between fixations—and explore factors that disguise it in normal vision.

Self-Luminosity Perception in a Reverspective

Alan Gilchrist, Rutgers Newark
Use of a 3D canvas, as in the delightful “reverspective” paintings of Patrick Hughes, allows a larger luminance range than normal, because different facets of the canvas receive different amounts of illumination. Viewed monocularly the observer sees a hallway (concave) with a white ceiling and glowing ceiling lights. Seen with two eyes, the display is convex, lit from above, the “ceiling” is black, and the “lights” are merely white trapezoids.

SMI Demonstrates Eye Tracking for Immersive Perception Research Based on Samsung Gear VR Headset

Lisa Richardson, SensoMotoric Instruments, Inc.
SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) will demonstrate their proven Eye Tracking HMD technology for immersive perception research. The new product, based on a Samsung GearVR headset, supports instant live observation of eye movements in the virtual scene and brings undeniable benefits to spatial cognition research and similar projects.

Stimulus Induced Nystagmus and Dynamic Pupil Demonstrations

Greg Perryman, Kurt Debono, SR Research Ltd.
Experience immediate feedback based on your pupil-size as you observe simple stimuli or undertake a simple cognitive load task. In another demonstration, experience nystagmus eye-movements generated from a moving sin-wave grating.

The Stolen Voice Illusion

David Brang, Satoru Suzuki, Marcia Grabowecky, Northwestern University
Male and female faces articulating phonemes are presented sequentially with increasing delay. Although speakers’ voices are always mismatched (e.g., male-face/female-voice), individuals fail to notice the gender-mismatch even at delays of ~500 ms. This novel illusion reveals that visual identity information overrides auditory temporal cues about when a voice is heard.

StroboPong

Brought to you by VSS and the Demo Night Committee
Back by popular demand. Strobe lights and ping pong!

Suppression of Saccadic Suppression

Peter April, Jean-Francois Hamelin, Stephanie-Ann Seguin, Danny Michaud, VPIXX Technologies
This demo uses the PROPixx high refresh rate DLP projector to show stimuli which are invisible during your fixations, and which magically appear only during your saccades.

The Synoptic Art Experience

Maarten Wijntjes, Fan Zhang, Delft University of Technology
The synopter gives both eyes similar perspectives, thus annihilating binocular disparities and removing the flatness cue of the picture surface. We found that it is very interesting an enjoyable to specifically use the synopter for viewing artworks. You will be able to synoptically view a large variety of paintings.

Thatcherize Your Face

Andre Gouws, Peter Thompson, University of York
The Margaret Thatcher illusion is one of the best-loved perceptual phenomena. Here you will have the opportunity to see yourself ‘thatcherized’ in real time and we print you a copy of the image to take away.

Vision Scientists Still Love Drifting Gabors

Matthew Harrison, Gennady Erlikhman, Gideon Caplovitz, University of Nevada, Reno
Building off our demonstration from last year, we present several novel configurations of drifting Gabors that result in surprising global motion percepts.