I met with optometrists Ritz Cannell and her colleague Claire at The Specky Wren, Brighton and showed them the Quizzer. Both found it easy to use and confirmed what Ritz had told me that it works through binocular vision, which most people have so most people should be able to see the effect. Claire, who had specialised in the subject confirmed what I had noticed from making work:
Movement will trump stillness and something travelling towards the viewer will trump all other movement.
They suggested that putting a cross in the real world and in on the image would help people to match the image with the live environment.
I asked them about difficulties people had looking through the Quizzer wearing glasses. They suggested building something into the design so that the glasses are anchored against the viewfinder and held parallel to it.
Paul Graham put me in touch with a colleague Lucas Wilkins at spoke to me from his lab via Skype where he was watching a parasitic wasp hatch. I was looking for the scientific vocabulary to describe what I had observed. He pointed me to binocular fusion and rivalry terms to explain what happens to merge the video and the real world in our brains, and how our brains prioritise certain information over others. So we ‘see’ someone move in a video over someone standing still in the real world. I watched a parkour sequence of my son through the Quizzer, while a man was having lunch on a wall where we had shot the footage. When my son leapt over the wall in the video the seated man momentarily disappeared. The effect was reliable even when I knew this was happening and watched for it. Perhaps I could make a sequence with live performers which plays with this phenomenon.
Fusebox residents and the wider XR brighton community were invited to the School of Engineering and Informatics at Sussex University Sussex University to view current demonstrations of work in progress. I met Gianluca Memoli who lectures in Novel Interfaces and Interactions who showed me 3D printed structures that direct sound. Outshift is a supporting company for his “Aurora: Controlling sound like we do with light” project. I am looking forward to getting his input on some of the phenomenon I have observed with the Quizzer.
