Perception of Anomaly
Perception of Anomaly For our project we are going to work with the concepts of neuroscience and how everything we experience is partly just a figment of our imagination, an illusion. We are proposing to take over three rooms and play with the spatial aspects that define the room to further develop this concept. Within the first room we will use one point perspective to change the depth perception and the space of the room from its reality. Since our brain has taught itself how to interpret what it sees, we are taking an idea that it is used to experiencing every day and recreating it in this space to trick the viewer. Using a projection and paint we will make the room look as though it continues on forever or at the very least further than what is “true.” Using mathematics and extreme precision, the one point perspective will change the depth perception of the room and will make our brains reevaluate the methods that it uses to compute things around us. The visual illusion will further demonstrate how the brain can fail to recreate the physical world.
We will start off by making measurements at the back of the room where people enter through the door. The illusion will start in the back and progress as it moves towards the front of the room. From the back equally spaced points will be drawn out as a line towards the chosen center point on the opposing wall (the front wall). This can be seen in the following example:
View from the ceiling looking at the floor, and view looking at the left wall and front wall.
Between the lines of the one point perspective we will paint this “cafe wall illustration” to create a flowing illusion that looks as if it disappears into the perceived distance.
This illusion is known as the Cafe Wall illusion, and it was first discovered by Richard Gregory's laboratory in a cafe in Bristol, in the U.K. The black and white tiles are perfectly straight, but look tilted. It is a shape distortion illusion: an object will appear to take on shapes that are different from its actual shape. Like brightness and color illusions, shape distortion effects are also produced by the interaction between the actual shape of the object and the shapes of nearby figures. For the brain, perception is very often dependent on context. Having this in the space will create an illusion but at the same time guide the viewer towards the direction of the two doors of the "Not Calm" room or the "Calm" room.
This room with the one point perspective will have a door on the right and on the left. The viewer will have the choice to go into either or both but they will have actual doors on them so that the viewer physically has to open it, and so that the illusion is not distorted by a hole in the wall. On the left will be the “Not Calm” room and on the right will be the “Calm” room.
The left hand room, “Not Calm” room, will have obnoxious red, yellow, and orange colors berating the viewer through an optical illusion. The lighting will be made up of bright spotlights. This is in an attempt to make the viewer uncomfortable and also to make them feel as if they have to leave the room. They may feel pressing aggression, anger, embarrassment, impatience, overly alert, clear, etc. Some feeling may be liked by some of the viewers but the average person is not attracted to this combination of color in such a sharp presentation of angular forms.
The right hand room, “Calm” room, will have a calming dark blue and lighter purple presented in soothing organic circular shapes. These shapes will be purple and the background will be a nice sea of deep blue that simulates peaceful water or a clear night sky. Within this room there will be a few soft lit lamps connected to the ceiling giving the room a calming glow. Feelings that may be attributed with this room may include calming, accepting, balanced, caring, deep, free, infinite, luxurious, introspective, peaceful, quiet, etc. This may make them want to stay longer in this room. Note: The example presented above has white lines around where the walls meet; this is so that you may get a better view of the 3D aspect of the room and will not show up in the actual project).
For the opening of the project we would start timing certain people who went into the different rooms and see how long they stayed in each. Probably they would stay in the “Calm” room longer and the “Not Calm” room for a shorter amount of time. If they did then it would back up our relation to studies done in neuroscience and how illusions of shape and color have different physical and mental effects on the viewer. Why this is true will be explained as follows:
Our brains make instant value judgments about the jumble of incoming sensory information, depending on what is important at that moment to us, to create a sensible narrative of the world around us.
Rather than pondering every bit of light that enters our orbs, the brain quickly jumps to conclusions, based on millions of years of evolution. Humans are intensely visual creatures, and we have developed an incredible apparatus for detecting things that are critical to our survival, such as predators, prey and mates. For instance, we can instantly mentally assemble several tiny patches of orange with stripes peeking through dense foliage: "tiger!" As we glance around a room, the image bounces on the retina (the light-receiving tissue at the back of the eye) as various areas of the scene excite different groups of cells. Yet the world appears stable to us, the view a smooth pan across our surroundings. The brain even fills in missing bits of picture in the eye's blind spot, where the optic nerve pierces the retina.
On the other hand, we do not see everything. Something that is irrelevant to a particular task will not make it to our conscious awareness. In one telling experiment, volunteers had to count how many times a basketball got passed between players. A person in a gorilla suit then strutted across the room. Concentrating on those ball passes, about half the volunteers did not see the gorilla.
Of course, the brain cannot actually tell us about what it is thinking as it processes sensory inputs, focusing on certain items and ignoring others. But our responses to illusions can be just as revealing. Scientists have long used these disarmingly simple--and fun--sensory tricks to probe the mind's inner workings.
The hypothesis claims that visual illusions are because the neural circuitry in our visual system evolves, by neural learning, to a system that makes very efficient interpretations of usual 3D scenes based in the emergence of simplified models in our brain that speed up the interpretation process but give rise to optical illusions in unusual situations. In this sense, the cognitive processes hypothesis can be considered a framework for an understanding of optical illusions as the signature of the empirical statistical way vision has evolved to solve the inverse problem. The retinal image is the main source driving vision but what we see is a "virtual" 3D representation of the scene in front of us. We don't see a physical image of the world. We see objects; and the physical world is not itself separated into objects. We see it according to the way our brain organizes it. The names, colors, usual shapes and other information about the things we see pop up instantaneously from our neural circuitry and influence the representation of the scene. We "see" the most relevant information about the elements of the best 3D image that our neural networks can produce. The illusions arise when the "judgments" implied in the unconscious analysis of the scene are in conflict with reasoned considerations about bite.
Our Sources:
http://www.sciam.com/slideshow.cfm?id=the-neuroscience-of-illusion&thumbs=horizontal&photo_id=F00513EF-85FC-1233-85FC83414B7FFE32
http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/knowl_illusion/knowledge-in-perception.pdf
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