Aliens among us
May 24, 2018 8:57 AM Subscribe
Came for the optical illusion, stayed for the demo, left before the explanation because all he seemed really wanted to be talking about was "youtubers" like that's something I should be interested in.
posted by glonous keming at 2:17 PM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 2:17 PM on May 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
His exposition may have been a tad lengthy, but I found one of his hypotheses (for the effect) to be interesting:
Our visual perception system is "hard-wired" to detect eyes, noses and lips. When we look at a person, face-on, our dedicated hardware wants to "assemble" the elements we see into a face (this is why we can easily hallucinate faces in electrical sockets, say).
When we're *not* paying attention directly to the face (say, by focusing on a "+"), this assembly still happens in the background.
Thus, when one set of features belonging to one human is replaced by those from a different person, our automatic processing tries to maintain some coherence... as if it's the same person's eyes, nose and lips merely moving.
Of course, that's not what is actually happening, so we perceive this as a series of ginormous facial acrobatics (Jim Carrey on steroids).
posted by rbanerjee at 12:07 AM on May 25, 2018
Our visual perception system is "hard-wired" to detect eyes, noses and lips. When we look at a person, face-on, our dedicated hardware wants to "assemble" the elements we see into a face (this is why we can easily hallucinate faces in electrical sockets, say).
When we're *not* paying attention directly to the face (say, by focusing on a "+"), this assembly still happens in the background.
Thus, when one set of features belonging to one human is replaced by those from a different person, our automatic processing tries to maintain some coherence... as if it's the same person's eyes, nose and lips merely moving.
Of course, that's not what is actually happening, so we perceive this as a series of ginormous facial acrobatics (Jim Carrey on steroids).
posted by rbanerjee at 12:07 AM on May 25, 2018
left before the explanation because all he seemed really wanted to be talking about was "youtubers" like that's something I should be interested in.Ha ha! You bailed on a 10 minute video after 2 minutes for comprehension fail. The issue is with finding an appropriate image and the legal right to use that image. Dude's just doing due diligence in his video creation. As a side note, I imagine that this went more like: opens whatsapp or whatever and posts "hey peeps, I need a CC licensed front face shot like this *click* to use in a video" and his fellow STEM-video producing friends went "hell yeah, here you go". YouTube is not mentioned after the explanation of having the rights to use the images.
So, I feel sorry for you for bailing over that.
(He does tend to be a bit long winded at times.)
posted by zengargoyle at 11:32 AM on May 25, 2018
Well, you know, life is short so I try to guide my viewing to things I'll actually enjoy and I wasn't getting a pleasant vibe of this guy's implication that I should know who all these modern digital celebrities are based on their faces, but it's true: I am pretty stupid.
posted by glonous keming at 8:45 AM on May 26, 2018
posted by glonous keming at 8:45 AM on May 26, 2018
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posted by MexicanYenta at 11:56 AM on May 24, 2018