CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar  (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 12:50-2:05 · Gates B01 · Open to the public
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Rob Tow · Interval Research
Visual Psychophysics in Humans and Non-Humans With Some Notes on Applications to Computer Scanning, Printing, and Video
January 27, 1993

Explore the limits of perception in humans and non-humans - find out whether the pointilistic illusions of our technologies (like television) would fool an intelligent alien species; why cats live in a different visual world than do people (or hawks); what Terran species has the best color vision (it's NOT Homo Sapiens); how to design video that will fool a bee's visual system; learn how to do better halftoning than Adobe Systems; directly see the modulation transfer function of your visual system - and that of JPEG and MPEG image compression; find out who first did raster scanning (it wasn't a human!); look at an eye that uses grazing incidence mirrors instead of a lens; get the inside scoop on the principles behind Xerox's "Smart Paper" and "Glyph" technology... and more!


Rob Tow is a gonzo scientist/inventor/hacker with two issued and three pending patents in imaging science, all based on applied visual psychophysics, who left Xerox PARC last year in search of the Real World... and has ended up at Interval Research Corp, where he has joined a ten-year/$100M mission to invent the future.