Brightness and Darkness

A brief note. I just ran across “Brightness and Darkness as Perceptual Dimensions” on PLoS. I can’t say I fully grok the contents, but the authors suggest that brightness and darkness behave not simply as polar opposites, rather as axes of a brightness-darkness space (i.e., the brain processes the two differently). Hrm.

As the authors state, “Vision scientists have long adhered to the classic opponent-coding theory of vision, which states that bright–dark, red–green, and blue–yellow form mutually exclusive color pairs.” But, “Here we provide direct evidence that brightness and darkness form the dimensions of a two-dimensional (2-D) achromatic color space. […] Our 2-D model generalizes to the chromatic dimensions of color perception, indicating that redness and greenness (blueness and yellowness) also form perceptual dimensions. Collectively, these findings suggest that human color space is composed of six dimensions, rather than the conventional three.”

Definitely merits a closer reading…

Blurry Binocs

I apologize for my lack of posts recently. I’ve been terribly distracted—in way I’ll announce soon enough—and the blog has languished. For which I apologize. We’ll see if I can get back in my groove!

A quickie for today. I just ran across the fantastic Journal of Vision: “a scientific periodical devoted to all aspects of visual function in humans and other organisms,” published for free online in a format that “encourages the effective use of color, multimedia, hyperlinks, program code, and other digital enhancements.” Hours of fun! This is great stuff.

The image above comes from an article about how contrast differences affect binocular vision. (BTW, a “saccade” is a rapid movement of the eye; that will help you decipher a good part of the article.) A little on the technical side, but the kind of information that might be helpful when designing content for, say, a stereo display.

There’s more to come! Just a teaser while I get back in the swing of things…