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...

Measuring 3D point configurations in pictorial space

We propose a novel method to probe the depth structure of the pictorial space evoked by paintings. The method involves an exocentric pointing paradigm that allows one to find the slope of the geodesic connection between any pair of points in pictorial space. Since the locations of the points in the picture plane are known, this immediately...

Aging and the haptic perception of 3D surface shape

Two experiments evaluated the ability of older and younger adults to perceive the three-dimensional (3D) shape of object surfaces from active touch (haptics). The ages of the older adults ranged from 64 to 84 years, while those of the younger adults ranged from 18 to 27 years. In Experiment 1, the participants haptically judged the shape of...

Illusory gloss on Lambertian surfaces

It has recently been shown that an increase of the relief height of a glossy surface positively correlates with the perceived level of gloss (Y.-H. Ho, M. S. Landy, & L. T. Maloney, 2008). In the study presented here we investigated whether this relation could be explained by the finding that glossiness perception correlates with the skewness of...

Cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation: Comparing objects between senses

The simple experience of a coherent percept while looking and touching an object conceals an intriguing issue: different senses encode and compare information in different modality-specific reference frames. We addressed this problem in a cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation task. Two objects in various orientations were presented at the...

Pragmatic Concerns and Images of the World

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars’s famous manifestscientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers—including, arguably, Sellars—often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between...

Illusory gloss on Lambertian surfaces

It has recently been shown that an increase of the relief height of a glossy surface positively correlates with the perceived level of gloss (Y.-H. Ho, M. S. Landy, & L. T. Maloney, 2008). In the study presented here we investigated whether this relation could be explained by the finding that glossiness perception correlates with the...

How consumers perceive product appearance; the identification of three product appearance attributes

The appearance attributes of designed products noted in the literature often reflect what designers themselves perceive in a product design. This present research, however, provides knowledge on how consumers perceive product appearance by identifying appearance attributes that consumers use to distinguish the appearances of durable products....

Haptic curvature contrast in raised lines and solid shapes

It is known that our senses are influenced by contrast effects and aftereffects. For haptic perception, the curvature aftereffect has been studied in depth but little is known about curvature contrast. In this study we let observers explore two shapes simultaneously. The shape felt by the index finger could either be flat or convexly curved. The...

Transparency and imaginary colors

Unlike the Metelli monochrome transparencies, when overlays and their backgrounds have chromatic content, the inferred surface colors may not always be physically realizable, and are in some sense “imaginary.” In these cases, the inferred chromatic transmittance or reflectance of the overlay lies outside the RGB spectral boundaries. Using the...

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...

The Influence of Teleoperator Stiffness and Damping on Object Discrimination

Human task performance using teleoperator systems depends on the physical and controlled parameters of the system. Two teleoperated grasping tasks—size and stiffness discrimination—were studied to investigate how changes in system parameters influence human capabilities. The device characteristics altered were teleoperator stiffness (size and...

The effects of sensory impairments on product experience and personal well-being

To determine the roles the sensory modalities play in user-product interactions, one modality was blocked during the execution of eight simple tasks. Participants reported how they experienced the products and how they felt during the experiment. Blocking vision resulted in the largest loss of functional information, increased task difficulty...