Recently in video Category

Cancer surgery has left Roger Ebert without the ability to speak or eat food. This video talks about how Rogers has dreams of talking and eating. Towards the end, the video discusses how researchers are reconstructing a computerized voice for Roger based on archived recordings of his actual voice.

Jimmy Fallon broke out his spot-on Neil Young impression last night for a heart wrenching rendition of "Pants On The Ground." The tune, penned by 62-year-old "American Idol" contestant General Larry Platt, has been making the rounds this week due to ridiculous lyrics like "Pants on the ground / Lookin' like a fool with your pants on the ground!" But coming out of Neil Young's emotional voice, those words never sounded more poignant.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/15/pants-on-the-ground-neil_n_424468.html

This was just fun to watch. How is it that two people can sing the same song and have it come out so different? Does Fallon do a good impression of Young? How is our brain fooled by good impressions?

This relates to my previous post. A little more on the topic of the stop motion animation techniques. This is useful if you want to give stop motion a try. What would you need to know about the perception of biological motion?

Here is a clip on how to set up an animation studio:. If you were to set up a studio, what considerations would you make knowing what you know about sensation and perception?

I found a site where this guy builds miniature sets. But they only showed the sets with nothing to compare them to so there was no way to scale them and you couldn't fully appreciate the work. So I found a youtube with some guy making sets out of cardboard. They are miniature, but not realistic. There are a bit too many ads as well. If you find a better video let me know and I'll replace this one.

Watch the video and discuss what is going on and how it relates to what we are studying. If you want, go ahead and build a miniature set of your own.

Ever wiggle a pencil in front of your eyes and it appears to be bending? This is result of our visual system having a limitation on the sampling rate speed it has. Remember that vision is a neural activity and neurons have to go through a very brief refractory period before they can fire again. If our sampling rate were higher, this is how something as simple as a rain drop would look - this is very cool!

And if you want, go this site that has a water drop synthesizer. Notice how you can change the frequency, variability, and number of drops to make it sound like a sink, bath-tub, or rain...