SuperBoB

I read two interesting articles involving perception today. The first describes “projection” by our brain of what the immediate future will be based on what we are seeing. This is rather intriguing because it seems to describe optical illusions as caused by our mental processing of visual input. Where does this projection happen? If I bypass the optical nerve, where do I have to “hook in” to get raw input and not a massaged version of that input. If the article is correct, I wouldn’t normally want to do this. It would look like latency on a Quake server. I think the Quake analogy is appropriate because of the next article. frog design has come up with a “helmet” that would filter out perception. The article mentions that sight, smell, and sound could all be filtered. Consider that Quake clients had to predict where the viewpoint would be based on information it got from the server. If this prediction wasn’t in place, you got the sluggish, almost drunken response to controls. If latency got high enough, you got this behavior anyway. Nicolas Cage was in a movie release last year called “Next”. If a client in the helmet could be used to predict the future, possibly for up to seconds in the future, would we get the type of effect that Cage’s character Cris Johnson had? Because we would take too long to adapt our normal vision, I would anticipate a split-screen effect, where one part of the screen would show the proposed future while the other piece would show a basically unedited stream. I say basically unedited, because the present stream could still have enhancements like I have mentioned in earlier posts. There could still be enhanced range of vision, such as false color IR and UV ranges. There could also be on-screen HUD information showing additional information about a view, such as recognition of landmarks, or distance to a marked item. For the future stream, I don’t know if this would give us “bullet time”, but it would be an interesting application of the technology.