Probing pictorial relief: From experimental design to surface reconstruction

The perception of pictorial surfaces has been studied quantitatively for more than 20 years. During this time, the “gauge figure method” has been shown to be a fast and intuitive method to quantify pictorial relief. In this method, observers have to adjust the attitude of a gauge figure such that it appears to lie flat on a surface in pictorial...

Probing pictorial relief: From experimental design to surface reconstruction

The perception of pictorial surfaces has been studied quantitatively for more than 20 years. During this time, the “gauge figure method” has been shown to be a fast and intuitive method to quantify pictorial relief. In this method, observers have to adjust the attitude of a gauge figure such that it appears to lie flat on a surface in pictorial...

Haptic perception disambiguates visual perception of 3D shape

We studied the influence of haptics on visual perception of three-dimensional shape. Observers were shown pictures of an oblate spheroid in two different orientations. A gauge-figure task was used to measure their perception of the global shape. In the first two sessions only vision was used. The results showed that observers made large errors...

Haptics disambiguates vision in the perception of pictorial relief

In this study we demonstrate that touch decreases the ambiguity in a visual image. It has been previously found that visual perception of three-dimensional shape is subject to certain variations. These variations can be described by the affine transformation. While the visual system thus seems unable to capture the Euclidean structure of a shape...