Perception

After watching the video, The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Design, I dig up my notes and have them organized here.

Perceptual Invariants

Perceptual invariants is the unchanging aspects of the environment from the observer’s viewpoint. Generally, we use it to interpret the size or distance of objects around us.

Texture gradient

Texture gradient is the distortion in size which closer objects have compared to objects farther away. It also involves groups of objects appearing denser as they move farther away… There are three main forms of texture gradient: density, perspective, and distortion of texture elements. Wiki page

The role of light in perception - J.J. Gibson

A real world scenario which utilize the texture gradient: Pilots land planes better with the richness of the cues (light) in the environment as on pilot ability. The structure in the light or ‘optic array’ seems to be as important which is why landing strips are so well lit.

Richness of environment

Speed control on roads works by changing the structure of the perceived world (sensory input), not by appealing to internal perceptual or cognitive processes (decision processes) with a ‘reduce speed’ sign. This can be seen with the gap of the lines becomes closer to each other as they near to roundabout. It is designed for the drivers to reduce speed by having them notice the ‘increase’ in speed through the perception of the lines’ gap.

Horizon ratio

Objects which are the same size but different distances away from the observer are “cut” by the horizon in the same ratio, whereas object of different sizes at the same distance away have different horizon ratios

Motion

Motion results in the flow of optic information around perceiver

This is something interesting to watch, from Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

In the video, the perceived train speed changes based on the field of view of the observer. In games, by changing the field of view will result in the perceived speed without modifying the actual object’s speed.

Gestalt principles

Human breaks down the perceived world into a number of separate sensations and then associate togther in order to perceive integrated objects (reductionist).

Some of the grouping principles:

• Similarity : example, perceive a row of cirlce as one group and another row of triangle as one group
• Proximity : example, even if there is gap, few crosses can be perceived as a square
• Good Continuation : example, constellation
• Closure : example, two Cs facing each other will be perceived as a circle

Illusion

Illusion are highly context dependent. With a cue such as background object (Ponzo illusion) or fins pointing direction ( Muller-Lyer illusion), we may perceive the exact same thing differently.