What a difference temporal qualities make. (I’ll take the original.) A very cool experiment!

http://www.vimeo.com/12518619
I love this kind of exploration. JMS explores reverse perspective. Also check out the silhouette illusion test.

“Painted Russian Orthodox Icons sometimes featured what is called Byzantine-perspective in the buildings and backgrounds - as a way of describing God looking out at the world, through the painting. It’s a beautiful concept; a God’s perspective.”

Thanks Keith!

Steve DiPaola studies how Rembrandt controls the viewers gaze. Fantastic stuff. Thanks to boingboing.

In the discussion round of a recent talk, Ken Perlin discussed the linguistic allure inherent in the following sentence…

Time flies like an arrow,
fruit flies like a banana.

It tingles. And lingers. You have to go back and re-read it. Or you want to hear it again. Why? The words in the second half present themselves in one way due to the repetition, then reveal themselves to be something other than what they were expected to be. A verb becomes a subject, a preposition becomes a verb. They undergo a transformation and there’s a prickly moment in which they exist simultaneously with both meanings.

I’m convinced this is what happens with animation - particularly methods such as hand-drawn and claymation, possibly explaining why animation formats are more likely to be viewed repeatedly. You see something which is obviously a drawn line, or a chunk of clay. But frame for frame it becomes an animal, or a little girl, or a splash. Its simultaneously one thing and another. Its like business built on the rule-of threes; the first iteration establishes, the second confirms and the 3rd rips you out of your expectation, and there’s a key element of timing so that there’s a moment of ‘hang’ where both meanings exist simultaneously. Except with animation, there’s no pay-off moment… just a lingering tingle that accompanies the film.

Its an hypothesis which I’d love to see tested. How might this be done? Well, I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone’s been brain-scanned while listening to the above sentence, or while watching a comedy routine, but there’s probably a tell-tale flickering of activity. Hook up unwitting college students up and show them a filmed splash and a hand-drawn splash respectively. Then ask them if it tickles.

Images from the incredible Joseph Gilland and here.

I’ve been a bit quite lately, and am now happy to present one of the reasons. brainpets GbR has been awarded 2nd place in the Berlin ProjektZukunft competition for our work on a dedicated non-photorealistic rendering environment.

Above: 1st place winners exozet (Frank Zahn, Nhat Quang Tran & Robert Anderson) my partner Tatjana Maas and special prize winner Nico Palme.

Directors Luis Briceno, David Alapont and producer Jeremy Rochigneux present a must-see animated short. Its premise is simple and presented with brutal reduction. In this film, look development is elevated to story. As if with dialog, extrapolation of style is masterly avoided and so the impact is delivered with full force. Check it out by clicking the image above.

One of my favorite paint programs (ArtRage) looks like it will be getting some competition. Microsoft has gathered some top talent to develop a prototype painting program. Among them, Bill Baxter is a highlight. The above detail is from his work on Detail-Preserving Paint

Data-mining and non-photorealism are closely related, particularly when it comes to algorithms that abstract data according to variable criteria. They also are disciplines struggling to function under the influence and expectations of the human perception system and its sum-of-all-parts owner, the human. The beautiful mountainous landscape above is visualization of optimism bias as witnessed in earning estimates. The yellow lines represent well-informed daily projections of fairly short-term forecasts. The blue dots represent the arrival of reality.

Head over to the Frontal Cortex by Jonah Lehrer for more insight, including why wall street should be hiring the chronically depressed.

How about an analog particle image filter? Check out Lola Dupre’s great work.

Link thanks to wowgreat.

When I look back at an application like the impressionist by Paul Haeberli from 1988 I’m overcome with an odd mixture of emotions. Its such a beautiful illustration of how abstracted level of detail functions. Just draw about with brushes of various sizes. The haphazard positions of the resulting circles result in variable interpretations… particularly when painting over an area such as the human face. Despite the lack of control offered in this java applet, I’m amazed at how intuitive the process is and how emotive the results.

Then I get a melancholy rush. Lots has happened, and lots of great energy is currently unfolding (particularly in the generative design community) but there’s so much still just lying out unused before us. More at an old post by Ken Perlin.

http://www.vimeo.com/6654322
Vladimir Todorovic milks processing for some very intense abstract imagery. His description is appropriate, so if you’re looking for light entertainment, be warned:

The movie is made of five chapters, which critically address the questions of artistic and scientific efforts to understand nature. The topics that arise in those chapters are: sublime view on nature, role of knowledge, ubiquitous bureaucracy, and destruction of nature.

Keith beat me to this one. And tags me in the process. How cool is that?

Filters usually adjusts a pixel based on the values of neighboring pixels with the goal of controlling the image’s representative quality in some creative manner. But what happens when you through representation to the wind? Inspired by losslessprocessing, author of the animated Hiroshi Sugimoto image rewrite above, Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen got some groovy stuff. The rules are simple:

1. Pick two pixels from a random column. Swap them if the upper pixel has a higher hue than the lower pixel.
2. Pick two pixels from a random row. Swap them if the left pixel has a higher saturation (or brightness) than the right pixel.
3. Repeat the above steps until the image converges.

The results are fantastic. Here are a few, left the original, right the result.

Again and again, the motion communities such as processing.org show where the possibilities of non-photorealistic representation and animation are being explored - amongst VJs, motion designers and artists. I can’t wait to see what 3D artists such as Peter Blaskovic come up with once these possibilities are combined with 3D technologies. Check out his website of processing experiments for a taste of things to come. I’ve highlighted 3 pieces here. Above, fields - make sure to activate the field controls and change their ranges, move them about, etc. Also, leave it to render out a while to get dark, deep colors.

Biolab also seems simple, but the movements and affiliations of the individual points can become quite complex and beautiful. After filling your petri dish with some colorful populations, play with the membrane, separation and magnetic field strengths. Explosive!

And finally, ember. As the artist says:
Every small entity has its friend, which he wants to meet but he doesn’t want to meet another entities. Every entity is sometimes changing its friends, so life looks like this…
I highlighted one such entity above. Ain’t he cute! It would be even cooler if you could mark one in order to track it, or have a slider to control its cooperation level / mood.

Be sure to check out the others, quite a few simulations and interesting interface ideas.

Apparently, soldiers who grew up in either tough urban environments or rural areas with hunting experience both excel at sighting roadside bombs. Sgt. Maj. Burnett explains why these groups have an innate “threat-assessment” ability so much greater than suburban gamers, for example. “Video game enthusiasts are narrower in their focus, as if the windshield of their Humvee is a computer screen.”

In one way, this is non-news; it’s obvious that those who’ve had to rely on subtle visual cues in a real environment will have an advantage spotting such cues. In another way, its a reminder that the graphics we create and the context that we place them in does concretely affect the way we perceive our environment.

MyPenName pointed me to this from the comments section at GurneyJourney.
Related item of interest: Culture and Diverging Views of Social Events by Hannah Faye Chua.

I think I speak for most users of 3D applications when I say that I look a most music app interfaces with green-faced envy. This one, the Sample Toy by Marek Bereza is yet another demonstration of beautiful interface. Here, the hardware becomes part of the interface - but this app shines not just because of the iPhone. Beautifully intuitive interaction decisions. Thanks to CreativeApplications for the coverage.

Ed Yong reports on a study by Ibrahim Senay on the effect of grammatic formulation on motivation and performance. Briefly summarized, if you concentrate on the possibility of a task, you are more engaged in the doing of that task than if you concentrate on its certainty. And you’re more likely to repeat that task if its described via the imperfect (”I was doing”) rather than the perfect (”I did”).

Cool. But what’s this got to do with my blog? Well, I can’t help but suspect that this is relevant to the differences in perception between realistic and non-realistic imagery. What better way to envision the difference between the two than as the possibility of something versus its certainty?

Click the teal and orange palette above to read Todd Miro’s astute observation that - yes - evil has us firmly in its color correcting grip.

Edit:
And then check out yet another chunk of Gurney wisdom… very related and using an interesting bit of software to visualize color ranges.

Edit2: Thanks to Alex for the heads up!

No, this isn’t the new Day & Night poster - Pixar’s new short.  As cool as that is, its release is just a good excuse to point to Shank’s blog, and larger body of work. There are few concept artists who dabble so boldly in science, with a cool mix of artsy disrespect and well-digested knowledge. Soak it up!