IDAT 211 - Visual Perception

Visual perception outlines the ways in which we use visual cues to create meaning in the world.  These include paralax, focus, binocular, and monocular cues.  However our perception can easily be tricked, by subverting the normal rules assoctiated with how we percieve our world.  It is this, the amount of different ways in which we have challenged our visual perception that intrigues me most.  Usually refered to as optical illusions, these exceptions to the rules of perception occur both intentionally and unintentionally, either by means of creation for entertainment, or by conicidence.  For example many people use their artistic talents and also computing to create a wide range of optical illusions, which can require the viewer to either be active or passive in changing their perception.  This is intentional subversion.  However things such as the Charlie Chaplin mask experiment mentioned in the previous post, although set up for the video, may still occur with a mask in every day life.  This is therefore (mainly) an unintentional subversion.  Intentional subversion of our perception is much more common, due to the continuous creation of illusions for entertainment.  Below are a few examples of different types of illusion, both passive and active:

 Julian Beever street art shown from the correct and incorrect viewpoints (passive perception as long as you are in the right place)(http://blog.brains4all.com/brainblog/archives/globe.jpg)

(http://snapshotsofgod.com/images/magiceye.gif)A magic eye picture in which the viewer has to physically change the angle of their eyes to a parallel position in order to view the image (active).  This is both related to perception and to the way in which we physically see. Click on the image for a larger version, can you see the heart?

Traditional optical illusion the composition of the image causes your eyes to see black dots where the white gaps are (passive)

(http://www.collegeboredom.com/images/opticalillusions/opticalillusions01_img_1.gif)

Young woman - old man optical illusion.  This requires the viewer to actually turn the image upside down to see the illusion occur (active) (http://www.yugzone.ru/optical_illusions/img/catPics_perevert.gif)

This therefore demonstrates the wide range of different illusions that exist and how they can be passive or active depending on their content.  All of these images work in some way due to the ways in which our perception functions along a set of rules which we have learnt from birth.  By knowing these rules and developing things that go against them we are able to test our own perception and find out more about the way we find meaning in objects.