BVI SEMINAR:New technologies for improving the representation of human vision

Robert Pepperell, Cardiff Metropolitan University

Abstract: What is the best way to represent the three-dimensional world we see on a two-dimensional surface? For several hundred years there was basically one answer to this question: use linear perspective. Linear perspective is a method of mapping rays of light onto an image plane in a way that corresponds to well-understood laws of geometry and optics. It now underpins nearly all existing imaging technology. But even the artists who first developed linear perspective understood that it had severe limitations when it comes to representing the wide angled, binocular vision most humans enjoy. As has been pointed out many times, linear perspectival images viewed under everyday conditions do not replicate our visual experience of the world very well. Over the last two centuries various alternative methods have been proposed, normally by artists, which are claimed to better represent human visual perception. These are usually based on subjective judgments about how things appear to human observers rather the objective behaviour of light. Such methods, while interesting historically, were of limited utility to image-makers as they were even more complicated to apply than the rules of linear perspective. However, the current state of computer graphics allows us to manipulate image data in powerful ways, and to design systems that incorporate some of the subjective properties of vision that it was not previously practical to model. In this talk I will outline the approach my lab is taking to designing new technologies for representing human vision that are an improvement on what can currently be achieved with existing linear perspective-based technology. This will include some discussion of the art historical background to our work, the scientific data we have gathered, and demonstrations of some the technological solutions we have developed.

Biography: Robert Pepperell PhD is Professor of Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art and leader of Fovolab at Cardiff Metropolitan University. As an artist he has exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome. As an academic he has published widely in the fields of art history, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and perceptual psychology.