MetaFilter posts tagged with vision

The Future Gets Closer, Part II

StrikeTheViol — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:14:51 -0800

Practical gene therapy treatment emerges. Prosthetics that feel. Circumventing paralysis with brain implants.

Patterns for the Color Blind

netbros — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:44:59 -0800

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color vision deficiency. The color blind are unable to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites. The patterns and examples on We Are Color Blind help developers create websites the color deficient can use with minimal problems. Take a color vision test to see where you stand. 50 facts about color blindness.

The Future Gets Closer

StrikeTheViol — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:02:31 -0800

The practical possiblility of augmented reality contact lenses. Contact lenses that reshape the eye. Bone-anchored hearing aids. Voice box transplant plans.

Man recovers vision after 12 years by implanting tooth in eye

scrutiny — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:21:06 -0800

Recently, a man's sight was returned to him after losing it for 12 years. How did he do it? Surgeons drilled a hole through one of his canines, put a lens in it, and implanted the construct in his eye. The specific surgery is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis and was first pioneered in Italy in 1963. Essentially, a tooth and a small portion of the jaw is removed from the patient. A small hole is drilled into the tooth and a lens is attached inside. The tooth construct is implanted in the cheek to allow it develop a blood supply, and then later is implanted into the eye. Despite how unwieldy this procedure seems, it has a shockingly high success rate over time. In this survey of 181 patients, 85% retained functional use of their eye after 18 years, with approximately 55% retaining the best postoperative functionality.

The comicbook version ended with a giant squid...

Artw — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:18:11 -0800

Understanding comics - Scott McCloud recaps his comics theory work at TED. He also has two more graphic novels on the way. Lots of previously.

80 Million Tiny Images

carsonb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:46:00 -0800

A visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. [NSFW words included!]

Currently computers have difficult recognizing objects in images. While practical solutions exist for a few simple classes such as human faces or cars, the more general problem of recognizing all different classes of objects in the world (e.g. guitars, bottles, telephones) remains unsolved. Computer Vision researchers are currently investigating methods that can recognize and localize thousands of different object categories in complex scenes. A key component of these algorithms is the data used to train the computers' model of each object. Current approaches use collections of images gathered by hand. Our research explores how the billions of images available on the Internet can be used to train models for object recognition. With overwhelming amounts of data, many problems can be tackled with simple algorithms. We gathered from the web 79 million images. We are using this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs. You can help... get better training data for computer vision algorithms by labeling some of the images.

WordNet prev iously

A Museum of Living History

netbros — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 07:59:41 -0800

The Academy of Achievement brings students face-to-face with the extraordinary leaders, thinkers and pioneers who have shaped our world. Through profiles, biographies, and interviews Achievers in The Arts, Business, Public Service, Science, and Sports teach us how the Academy's core values of passion, vision, preparation, courage, perseverance, and integrity can, and will, lead to success. Includes a library of podcasts that are excerpts from symposium presentations from the Academy's international summits. Biographies from the Academy of Achievement have been linked on MetaFilter previously (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), but the full site has not been featured.

A new vision for the future poor

ardgedee — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:14:01 -0800

Wearers of Adaptive Eyewear can make their own prescriptions. The lenses are plastic bladders that change shape and corrective power with a small syringe. So far 30,000 people who may never be reached by an optician or afford conventional eyeglasses now have corrected vision. Recipients are now able to read, mend fishing nets, sew, and perform other tasks requiring good eyesight. The inventor, Oxford University professor Josh Silver, hopes his nonprofit organization can begin manufacturing and distributing up to 100 million pairs a year.

Eternally Surprising And Self-Generating Artworks

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:01:19 -0800

The bespoke generative design system at the heart of Forever will spawn unique audio-visual films everyday, forever. This winter the V&A John Madejski Garden will come alive with the latest digital commission by Universal Everything, a multidisciplinary design studio founded by creative director Matt Pyke in 2004... Working with a wide range of media from pencils to generative design, Universal Everything is a UK-based studio at the crossover between art and design.

twilight zone, the edge of light

nickyskye — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:28:55 -0800

The "terminator" is the dividing line between day and night as seen from on high. This shadow line is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. Color is a microconsciousness. The "twilight zone" The current terminator The terminator on the Earth and on the Moon

Here's looking at you/me, kid

cogneuro — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:31:13 -0800

More good stuff for people who like visual ("optical") illusions (previously): A nice Scientific American article, a particularly creepy illusion, and a link to the "Best visual illusion of the year" contest. Given that the eye/mind/brain is so easy to trick, a person might wonder what's really out there in the world.

Googly Eyebot

Kronos_to_Earth — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:56:43 -0800

"Double-Taker (Snout)" by Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White "...deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood, and autonomous surveillance. The project consists of an eight-foot (2.5m) long industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant's trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity...." Googly Eyebot. (via) Golan Levin's Double-Taker (Snout) Flickr set. And his Opto-Isolator is keeping track of things, too....

Ear-sighted

Kronos_to_Earth — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:30:02 -0800

"People with synaesthesia can’t help but get two sensory perceptions for the price of one. Some perceive colours when they hear words or musical notes, or read numbers; rarer individuals can even get tastes from shapes." (previously) Neuroscientist Melissa Saenz of the California Institute of Technology has discovered a new form [pdf] of synaesthesia. Can you hear the dots? (QT)

insert extremely clever title here

infini — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:40:37 -0800

Fortunes are rarely won by playing it safe. On the contrary, the biggest fortunes have been won by those willing to step outside the box and change the way the game is played. Following are twenty-five business innovators of the past, present, and future whose stories are different in many respects, but all point to the same truth: Ingenuity, improvisation, and daring are more important than following the rules (even though you might find yourself on the wrong side of the law once in a while). Via Fortune. Despite its enormous popularity, Craigslist has not received a great deal of respect as a business. Part of the reason is that the world’s premiere classifieds service seems to go out of its way to avoid making a profit. Most of the service is free. (It generates revenue solely through small fees for apartment and job listings in select cities.) There is no advertising. No branding. No attractive user interface. In sum, Craigslist does not actively compete for business. Craigslist’s CEO since 2000, Jim Buckmaster says the key to their success is an anti-commercial value system based on three “ironies”: “the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing, and noncompeting.” Instead of going for the quick profit like other startups, Craigslist survived the dot-com boom and bust by providing a service as simply and straightforwardly as possible. Buckmaster says, “We’re definitely oddballs in the Internet industry, and we always have been. Lots of people made fun of us, especially at the height of the dot-com boom. Most of those people are out of business now.” Those values and that vision is Craig's. If anyone has a clue I'd be curious to know why CL has been represented by Jim instead of Craig?

Different, that's how.

allkindsoftime — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:11:18 -0800

How do things look to colorblind people? Colour Lovers (Prev: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - all more useful to those who aren't colorblind) offers some popular websites and iconic art, As Seen By The Color Blind. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter. Prev. Wiki.

Argus eyes

Kronos_to_Earth — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:54:36 -0800

The day has a thousand eyes, as well.... (via)

Strange New Fish May See Like Humans

chuckdarwin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:35:24 -0800

A fish with forward facing eyes has been discovered in Indonesia. University of Washington fish expert Ted Pietsch thinks that the fish is probably a member of a previously undiscovered family of lure-less anglerfish.

Never will another spitwad go unpunished.

kaibutsu — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:24:09 -0800

Ever wish you had eyes in the back of your head?

Chick Sexing

parudox — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:14:53 -0800

"Over and over he scoops up a chick with his left hand, expels its droppings with a squeeze of his thumb, opens its vent with his fingers, peers through the magnifying lenses attached to his spectacles and determines its sex." It's a dirty job (YT). Sexing chicks early is important so that the cockerels can be separated and culled^ or fed to be broilers^. The obvious differences take weeks to develop, so when the vent sexing method was developed in Japan in the 1920s, professional chicken sexers became sought after. After years of training, they can sex a thousand day-old chicks an hour with 99% accuracy. In many cases the sexer cannot say why he made a particular decision. The method is learned mostly empirically and is not open to introspection, which has made it of considerable interest to philosophers and cognitive scientists. Vent sexing is in decline, however, owing to development of feather sexing (i.e. using breeds with differences in feather length or color). Would you like to learn to sex chicks? There are plenty of resources, such as A Guide to Sexing Chicks (1935). Better yet, The Specialist Chick Sexer is a modern treatment (there is an extract and another poultry essay available). You can sex all fowl, actually. Cognitive scientists, philosophers, and psychologists all like chicken sexing. Biederman (of geon^ fame) and Shiffrar showed (PDF) that novices can be trained to decent accuracy with explicit perceptual clues. There's a discussion of chicken sexing in the defunct PSYCHE-B cognitive science listserv (more useful archive here). Scroll down to see it, particularly Bruce Mangan's post. (There was an earlier post, and the main link is good if you can get access.)

See For Yourself - Optical Illusions

nthdegx — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:32:33 -0800

See For Yourself - Purves Lab's optical illusions web page with empirical explanations of familiar and unfamiliar illusions.

Apparently, we can rebuild him...

chuckdarwin — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:00:04 -0800

Doctors in London have made the world's first attempt to treat a retinal degeneration disorder using gene therapy. "The researchers aim to restore the activity in these cells and therefore restore vision by implanting healthy copies of the key gene into the RPE at the back of the eye. In other optical news, wired.com is leading with a piece about "Luke 's Binoculars" (yes, as in Skywalker) - a gadget that is meant to provide soldiers with a 120-degree field of view and allow him/her to be able to spot moving vehicles as far as 10 kilometers away by integrating EEG electrodes that monitor the wearer's neural signals. CTTWS, I presume?

The Phantom Compass Syndrome

Malor — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:27:41 -0800

Hacking the Senses: The brain is far more plastic than we commonly realize. Presenting new 'senses' via the old inputs works extremely well, to the point that long-term volunteers are a little lost without their new abilities to feel magnetic north or absolute orientation. Tasting direction; feeling pictures. Fascinating stuff. In a loosely related article, genetically modified mice are able to see the full color range visible to humans, even though the last natural mouse able to see this way died out a hundred million years ago. Add the new sensors, and the brain reconfigures. [via]

The Doors of Perception

jason's_planet — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 07:51:08 -0800

We’ve detected background radiation from the Big Bang. We’ve sent explorers to the bottom of the ocean and the moon above us. We have images of the individual atoms of which our world is made. But we cannot have direct access to the sensory experiences of another human being. Language can help to bridge the gap but it is an imperfect tool. The closest we have come is Brain Fingerprinting and even that only indicates recognition of a scene or object; it does not capture the actual visual memory of the scene or object. This may soon change. Several years ago, researchers at Berkeley wired a cat’s neurons to a computer and were able to obtain videos of what the cat was seeing.

Seeing is not always believing.

cenoxo — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:59:45 -0800

'Twas blind, but now I see? — Virgil surgically regained his sight after nearly 50 years of blindness: "On the day he returned home after the bandages were removed, his house and its contents were unintelligible to him, and he had to be led up the garden path, led through the house, led into each room, and introduced to each chair." In the end, he and others like him [PDF] would have rather stayed in the Country of the Blind. (A happier ending was the more recent case of Mike Mays, previously posted here.)

Perform the painless procedure*

jba — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:28:40 -0800

Perform the painless procedure* Affordable In-Home LASIK Surgery You Can Do Yourself!™
*This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.