Introducing artificial depth cues to improve task performance in ITER maintenance actions

Maintenance operations on ITER tokamak components will be largely performed by remote handling. In previous work it was shown that representative maintenance tasks could be performed significantly faster with direct visual feedback than with camera feedback. In post-test interviews, operators indicated that they regarded the lack of 3D...

Real 3D increases perceived depth over anaglyphs but does not cancel stereo-anomaly

Background: About 30% of the population has difficulties detecting the sign and the magnitude of binocular disparity in the absence of eye movements, a phenomenon called stereo-anomaly. The stereo-anomaly tests so far are based on disparity only (e.g. red-green stereograms), which means that other depth cues cannot be used and even provide...

Humans use visual and remembered information about object location to plan pointing movements

We investigated whether humans use a target's remembered location to plan reaching movements to targets according to the relative reliabilities of visual and remembered information. Using their index finger, subjects moved a virtual object from one side of a table to the other, and then went back to a target. In some trials, the target shifted...

Depth in colour, a history of a chapter in physiologie optique amusante: Review

Two centuries ago, Goethe wrote in his Farbenlehre about blue as a receding colour, against yellow/red as a colour 'piercing into the organ'. Though any verification of these psychological attributes seems to be absent, this depth effect in colour still seems to be taken for granted in art history. In visual science, the completely different and...

Perception of biological motion from limited-lifetime stimuli

The visual perception of human movement from sparse point-light walkers is often believed to rely on local motion analysis. We investigated the role of local motion in the perception of human walking, viewed from the side, in different tasks. The motion signal was manipulated by varying point lifetime. We found the task of coherence...

Combining cues while avoiding perceptual conflicts

A common assumption in cue combination models is that small discrepancies between cues are due to the limited resolution of the individual cues. Whenever this assumption holds, information from the separate cues can best be combined to give a single, more accurate estimate of the property of interest. We examined whether information about the...

Additive and subtractive transparent depth displays

Image fusion is the generally preferred method to combine two or more images for visual display on a single screen. We demonstrate that perceptual image separation may be preferable over perceptual image fusion for the combined display of enhanced and synthetic imagery. In this context image separation refers to the simultaneous presentation of...

Spatiotemporal configuration dependent pairing of nerve events in dark-adapted human vision

In the model presented here, in the dark any single quantum absorption in a rod or cone produces a subliminal excitation. Subliminal excitations from both halves of a twin unit pair in the retina for the perception of light from the stimulus. A twin unit contains either two red or two green cones. The twin units are intertwined in triples of two...

De Vries-Weber gain control and dark adaptation in human vision

Thresholds for seeing light from a stimulus are determined by a mechanism that pairs subliminal excitations from both halves of a twin unit. Such excitations stem from a package of k ≥ 1 receptor responses. A half-unit contains one red or one green cone and P rods. The receptor's "Weber machine" controls the receptor's gain. Each half of a twin...

Touch-typing VDU operation: Workstation adjustment, working posture, and workers' perceptions

At a VDU workstation professional touch-typing operators worked at eight different combined adjustments of visual target height and chair backrest inclination. Working posture, workers' perceptions and work performance were measured. Two conclusions were drawn. First, in order to minimize the load on the musculoskeletal system for touch-typing...

Attentional effects on preattentive vision: Spatial precues affect the detection of simple features

Most accounts of visual perception hold that the detection of primitive features occurs preattentively, in parallel across the visual field. Evidence that preattentive vision operates without attentional limitations comes from visual search tasks in which the detection of the presence or absence of a primitive feature is independent of the...

Attentional control within 3-D space

Four experiments investigated whether directing attention to a particular plane in depth enables observers to filter out information from another depth plane. Observers viewed stereoscopic displays and searched for a red line segment among green line segments. The results showed that directing attention to a particular depth plane cannot prevent...

Metamerisms in structure-from-motion perception

As a three-dimensional object is moving through our world, we generally obtain a vivid impression of both its structure and its motion through space. The time-course of two-dimensional projections of the scene (optic flow) is important in conveying this three-dimensional information to us. The extent to which we can solve this specific inverse...

TNO stereopsis test as an aid to the prevention of amblyopia

In this investigation, carried out under a Youth Health Care postgraduate course in Nijmegen, the stereopsis of a school population of 730 children, aged 4-18 years, was recorded and clinically evaluated. Stereopsis was measured using the TNO test, a random-dot stereo test especially designed for the early detection of amblyopia. The main aims...

Spatiotemporal representation of moving luminance edges in human vision

The edges of straight bars in a square-wave luminance grating appear undulating to an observer when the retinal image of this pattern is in motion. The amplitude of the perceived undulations increases linearly with retinal image speed with an average slope of 30 ± 4 ms. The period of the motion-induced bulges is 2.5 ± 0.5° and shows no...