ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: Glom on January 06, 2017, 04:05:19 PM
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I am a wreck. In 24 days I will complete the sale of my flat bringing to an end three and a half months of agonising. I am so jumpy at every little sound.
The latest trigger was a stripe on my ceiling. A stripe that was slightly darker than the surrounding white. Very slightly. Oh no. Is the radiator pipe for the flat above leaking and staining my ceiling? Why would it form a stripe? Maybe water is pooled into a channel by the beams in the ceiling and has been permeating through evenly?
Then a thought occurs. Anisotropy. No plaster in this place is laser straight. The experience getting my wardrobe fitted revealed that. Indeed, I look at where the ceiling joins the coving and I notice a slight angle.
The light source in the room was a lamp at the side shining across the stripe, with the stripe angled slightly away. Just a couple of degrees. I test this by moving the lamp to the other side of the room and sure enough, the very slightly darker stripe becomes a highlight.
It just goes to show what even tiny variations in a surface can do, especially to someone in a neurotic mindset looking for faults. We hear conspiracists complain about light patches suggesting the presence of spot lights, when the simply explanation is the anisotropy of the terrain is causing the highlight to be slightly angled more towards the Sun. But of course, if you want to find fault, you'll invent all sorts of cow and chicken stories to fit irrelevant blemishes.
Of course, if in a few days, the ceiling comes down and water is pissing everywhere, I'll ask this be deleted.
And what's that sound? Oh it's my dishwasher. Never mind.
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And another reason why we in theater instinctively texture all surfaces (that is, give them some color variation). Because solid color isn't. If you try to make it flat and plain what you get instead is every single seam and fleck and shadow. Instead, make it so the texture you are adding will dominate.
I'm about to do the same thing on a set I'm lighting next week; I'm going to put breakups in all the front lighting because there are some visible and ugly seams in the painted scenery. It also really helps to disguise the edges of the light cones and the various crossing shadows.
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Sounds like a "still life" version of the Uncanny Valley.
That is, unless you're sure you can achieve perfection, it's best not to try. :)
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Yah. We're going through hell now on some acoustic panels. Two different clients want them flat off-white. Which means every dust smear, fabric ripple, shadow, even the density of the backing material shows up. Means a lot more work, and at least one of these clients is high-maintenance enough to scream if there is any visible defect.
Thing of it is? These have printed surfaces. So to get that off-white color it is actually being run through a giant fabric printer. With all the potential for ink drips and smears and transfer marks that entails, of course. But...printed. So it could have a subtle texture printed right in. A hint of a weave, a barely-there cross-hatch or pebbling, some gaussian noise; any of these would make them in my opinion look vastly better.
Heck, most walls in your house are textured for exactly that reason. It just plain looks better. Even an actually perfect flat surface won't present that way to your brain, because your eyes aren't set up for that. They're going to throw phosphene-like effects at any void.
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It's amazing, isn't it? For example, I'm standing on the scales and they say I have put on 2KG over Xmas. That has to be an illusion, right?
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Yeah because everyone knows it should add way more than that!
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It's amazing, isn't it? For example, I'm standing on the scales and they say I have put on 2KG over Xmas. That has to be an illusion, right?
Localised gravitational anomaly...
Yep.
Definitely.
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Speaking of terrain, looking at Apollo anaglyphs is just amazing. The monotone nature of the terrain can make it blend together into a mass in a 2D single image, but it just pops when in 3D. You can see all the hillocks and little dips and climbs. It's really quite spectacular. Really helps you appreciate just how rough it all is.
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Yes, I keep trying to say exactly that to hoaxers who complain about this or that not looking "right".
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Very good post, Glom. Thank you. I might share it somewhere, IYDM.
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Speaking of terrain, looking at Apollo anaglyphs is just amazing. The monotone nature of the terrain can make it blend together into a mass in a 2D single image, but it just pops when in 3D. You can see all the hillocks and little dips and climbs. It's really quite spectacular. Really helps you appreciate just how rough it all is.
You get the same from Mars stereo photography. It also explains why so much of my early photography of the Utah landscape didn't seem as exciting as when I was standing there.
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Well, the eye is a stereoscopic motion camera that does HDR. But that still doesn't quite explain the discrepancy between what it looks like and what it shoots like. I think a lot of that lies in the fact that the foveal view is relatively small in relation to the whole, and our brains largely ignore the background when looking at a really cool bird or something. So what stood out in the mind ends up captured on the frame as a whole bunch of cluttered background detail and a little spec in the middle that looked so much more interesting when you were there.
(I had the same problem grabbing sound effects on location. Most people, even trained sound designers, don't notice all the background noise. Tape, unfortunately, captures it all).
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Speaking of terrain, looking at Apollo anaglyphs is just amazing. The monotone nature of the terrain can make it blend together into a mass in a 2D single image, but it just pops when in 3D. You can see all the hillocks and little dips and climbs. It's really quite spectacular. Really helps you appreciate just how rough it all is.
Sorry if I sound like a lousy Googler, but can you give specific examples, particularly of any that show both close and distant lunar features?
I've had trouble seeing some 3D images since having cataract surgery, but I'm certainly not complaining because without it I probably would have been totally blind by 2000. The ones that require red and blue goggles are now the hardest to view -- unless, of course, I have the wrong colours, but I don't know whether I have right or wrong colours.
I have all the Apollo lunar surface photos on my HD from the ALSJ's DVDs, so it's not too hard to put stereo pairs and panorama shots side-by-side, but they have to be placed so I can view them by crossing my eyes, not looking straight, which is also difficult.
The problems the astronauts had with perspective on the moon have always intrigued me, and it took a long time to notice one thing that might cause problems, other than the lack of known objects that give scale.
They were looking at a landscape full of craters, from just millimetres to kilometres in diameter.
At a certain distance the tiniest craters would become too small to see and bigger ones would take over. This would repeat with bigger and bigger craters as far out as craters can be seen, and with no atmosphere to provide haze, the clarity of the view might make it very hard to accurately estimate the size and distance of any particular crater.
It's a sort of visual compression and there's probably a name for it. If so I'd like to know.
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...The ones that require red and blue goggles are now the hardest to view -- unless, of course, I have the wrong colours, but I don't know whether I have right or wrong colours.
Okay, I tried my cardboard red/cyan goggles on some Apollo Anaglyphs and am getting weird results.
Phil Plait recommended this one:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/29774727@N04/4519119504/sizes/o/in/photostream/
which he says is the Apollo 14 landing site. After a lot of study of the maps at the ALSJ I sort of agreed, if the two biggest craters at bottom left are indeed North Triplet and Center Triplet.
But with the goggles on, those two craters look very steep-sided and roughly about 80 to 100 metres deep, yet the Post-Flight Apollo 14 Traverse Map (4.1 MB)
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a14/a14-usgs.jpg
with contour lines, indicates that they are much shallower. I scoured the Apollo 14 ALSJ and found no mention of the depths of the Triplet craters. This PDF without electronic text
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/a14pp-021-030.PDF
says on page 23, "North Triplet crater had an original depth of about 30 m".
Looking at some Apollo and some non-Apollo anaglyphs I saw three weird effects in many of the photos -- excellent 3D, vastly over-exaggerated 3D, and no 3D at all where it should be. And sometimes a fourth effect -- a strange banding that shouldn't be there.
Now, that could be the result of my goggles (cardboard giveaways from HBO) or my eyes, my age, or poor processing, or any and all of those. In fact some of the anaglyph images looked much better in their original single-image form without the goggles, but without 3D.
Maybe I'm just being fussy. Perhaps spoilt back in the 1950s by those old hand-held 3D viewers with a gazillion two-image black-and-white or hand-coloured cards that used to be in every second-hand store and thrilled me at the age or four, or later spoilt even more at the grand old ages of 6 to 8 by the brilliant Viewmaster system with its fantastic, vibrant colour images. I got one Viewmaster reel for my seventh birthday and bought one or two more with a gift of a few shillings. They seem to have been many times better than these new-fangled anaglyphs, but maybe it was my young eyes that made them so vibrant.
H-E-L-P !!! What's going wrong? I want to see good 3D.
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Speaking of terrain, looking at Apollo anaglyphs is just amazing. The monotone nature of the terrain can make it blend together into a mass in a 2D single image, but it just pops when in 3D. You can see all the hillocks and little dips and climbs. It's really quite spectacular. Really helps you appreciate just how rough it all is.
I really wish I could see anaglyphs. My eyes don't do that at all (I have one strongly dominant eye and my brain refuses to make 3D pictures work... although strangely some 3D films work OK).
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I really wish I could see anaglyphs. My eyes don't do that at all (I have one strongly dominant eye and my brain refuses to make 3D pictures work... although strangely some 3D films work OK).
Interesting. I know of at least one person whose stereoblindness was actually cured (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world) by watching a 3D Film (though not red cyan anaglyph, more modern polarized glasses).
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I really wish I could see anaglyphs. My eyes don't do that at all (I have one strongly dominant eye and my brain refuses to make 3D pictures work... although strangely some 3D films work OK).
Interesting. I know of at least one person whose stereoblindness was actually cured (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world) by watching a 3D Film (though not red cyan anaglyph, more modern polarized glasses).
That is interesting. Maybe I should go and see more 3D films. (I watched The Martian in 3D and it was very effective!)
I'm still not really sure whether I see in 3D like other people, though. I mean, I can catch a ball, play squash etc with no problems, but the real world doesn't "pop" like a 3D movie does.
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I really wish I could see anaglyphs. My eyes don't do that at all (I have one strongly dominant eye and my brain refuses to make 3D pictures work... although strangely some 3D films work OK).
Interesting. I know of at least one person whose stereoblindness was actually cured (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world) by watching a 3D Film (though not red cyan anaglyph, more modern polarized glasses).
That is interesting. Maybe I should go and see more 3D films. (I watched The Martian in 3D and it was very effective!)
I'm still not really sure whether I see in 3D like other people, though. I mean, I can catch a ball, play squash etc with no problems, but the real world doesn't "pop" like a 3D movie does.
Sigh. Once again, I abhor 3D movies, my eldest wears glasses and hates them, my youngest doesn't wear glasses and she hates them. Any time a movie of interest is released, I am greeted by a chorus of "2D" to my eternal relief.
Seems to me that 3D is a matter of preference and fashion.
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I'm still not really sure whether I see in 3D like other people, though. I mean, I can catch a ball, play squash etc with no problems, but the real world doesn't "pop" like a 3D movie does.
Not only do I think that it can vary from person to person, but sometimes the 3D effects seem more obvious (or more "dramatic") in some scenes than they are in others.
I saw The Martian in 3D and while I thought the 3D effects were good, it was nothing dramatic. I recently watched it again in 2D on a 40" HDTV and for mine, it didn't really lose anything.
Same applies to the only other movie I have seen in 3D, Avatar. Most of the 3D seemed a bit "meh" to me, but there was one scene that really stood out (no pun intended). It was the scene where the two main characters were in the forest, and a whole lot of bright spore-like objects were raining down across the whole screen and landing on the main character. I really felt like the nearest ones were landing in my lap!!
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Most important thing is that my flat is ancient history so I can now relax. All I have to worry about now is when my new house will be ready. And building my nascent career. And getting into the US in three weeks. And my family's health issues (nothing too serious, a gammy shoulder and a pregnancy). And Brexit and the destruction of the Union, particularly their impact on my job. But not my old flat.
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I really wish I could see anaglyphs. My eyes don't do that at all (I have one strongly dominant eye and my brain refuses to make 3D pictures work... although strangely some 3D films work OK).
Interesting. I know of at least one person whose stereoblindness was actually cured (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world) by watching a 3D Film (though not red cyan anaglyph, more modern polarized glasses).
Almost certainly something getting re-wired in the brain.
Remember the white/gold or blue/black dress internet meme from a couple of years back? It was always, always white/gold for me. I spent ages researching the issue, which involved spending a lot of time looking at the picture. One day I went back to it, but couldn't find the white/gold image anywhere, no matter where I looked on the tinterweb. I'd basically 'cured' myself of the ability to see this image as white/gold: I must have rewired my brain to perceive the image as blue/black.
I miss the white/gold dress, I think it looked nicer :(
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What follows is pure speculation, so take it for what it's worth...
No two people have eyes that are exactly the same distance apart, so it's not surprising to me that 3D effects (whether red-blue or polarized) would work better for some people than for others. I'm sure the image offset is chosen based on the most common distance, but for someone whose pupils are more or less than that common distance apart, the 3D effect will be less ... effective, for lack of a better term.
It's like those Magic Eye (http://www.magiceye.com/3dfun/stwkdisp.shtml) images that have 3D patterns hidden in an abstract pattern. I can usually find them pretty easily, but I know other people who can't, no matter how long they stare at it.
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I'm one of them.
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I'm one of them.
Join the club.
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Love them, here's a relevant one for this group that's really easy to see. :)
(http://i68.tinypic.com/24pxxm8.jpg)
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I don't see anything in this image.
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I don't see anything in this image.
Nothing doing here either.
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Wow so strange how peoples perception differs, it shows an un-tethered astronaut outside the space shuttle with the word NASA above.
To see this click on it and make it larger, try looking past the image for a few seconds, once it comes into view it's hard not to see it.
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It's a matter of disconnecting where you direct your eyes and where you focus them, for practice look into the distance and hold up a finger. You should see two out-of-focus images of the finger against the distant background. Now try and get the finger images into focus without changing where your eyes are pointing. For these puzzles you have to focus on the screen but direct your eyes at a point behind it.
How did he get to do an EVA with the payload doors closed?
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To see this click on it and make it larger, try looking past the image for a few seconds, once it comes into view it's hard not to see it.
With the above type of image though I get a weird 3D cut-out effect. I can see the NASA, but it appears as a hole through which I can see the letters. It's like my brain is recognising the 3D effect and giving me part of the intended result, but not all of it. Very, very strange.
With this type of image I can see the 3D effect very easily using the cross-eye technique
(http://i.imgur.com/ORYVSFt.jpg)
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Wow so strange how peoples perception differs, it shows an un-tethered astronaut outside the space shuttle with the word NASA above.
To see this click on it and make it larger, try looking past the image for a few seconds, once it comes into view it's hard not to see it.
I'm too right brained for this activity, but since you mentioned astronaut, I can recognize the golden(?) visor.
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"Just see it" is not helpful advice. I've been told how to see them, and I've never been able to. In this one, I can tell what it's supposed to be, but my brain won't work the trick.
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No two people have eyes that are exactly the same distance apart, so it's not surprising to me that 3D effects (whether red-blue or polarized) would work better for some people than for others. I'm sure the image offset is chosen based on the most common distance...
Actually the baseline distance varies a lot and is often much wider than human eye separation.
But you're onto something. Human depth perception is actually a combination of many dissimilar factors, only one of which is retinal disparity (the difference in the image seen by the left and right eye). Physiology contributes to two other factors -- convergence feedback and dynamic parallax. For nearby objects, the degree to which your eyeballs have to turn inward to bring the object of attention into the same position in the field of view provides neuromotor feedback. Similarly in the real world we constantly move and turn our heads almost imperceptibly. Almost. Because the eyeballs lie some distance from the axes of cranial rotation, this motion provides subtle relative movement of objects in the field of view.
For most depth perception we rely upon a vast memory of seen objects and details and a knowledge of their expected sizes. Their relative size in the field of vision is ironically the strongest depth cue. The others generally work only with objects not more than a few dozen meters away.
But since depth perception is a mixture of different phenomena that are affected differently by various artificial 3-D encoding schemes, the degree to which each is successful varies according to individualized reliance on one type of depth cue over others.
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No two people have eyes that are exactly the same distance apart, so it's not surprising to me that 3D effects (whether red-blue or polarized) would work better for some people than for others. I'm sure the image offset is chosen based on the most common distance...
Actually the baseline distance varies a lot and is often much wider than human eye separation.
But you're onto something. Human depth perception is actually a combination of many dissimilar factors, only one of which is retinal disparity (the difference in the image seen by the left and right eye). Physiology contributes to two other factors -- convergence feedback and dynamic parallax. For nearby objects, the degree to which your eyeballs have to turn inward to bring the object of attention into the same position in the field of view provides neuromotor feedback. Similarly in the real world we constantly move and turn our heads almost imperceptibly. Almost. Because the eyeballs lie some distance from the axes of cranial rotation, this motion provides subtle relative movement of objects in the field of view.
For most depth perception we rely upon a vast memory of seen objects and details and a knowledge of their expected sizes. Their relative size in the field of vision is ironically the strongest depth cue. The others generally work only with objects not more than a few dozen meters away.
But since depth perception is a mixture of different phenomena that are affected differently by various artificial 3-D encoding schemes, the degree to which each is successful varies according to individualized reliance on one type of depth cue over others.
This all takes me back to a year ago and the report I wrote on full flight simulators and the difficulty in replicating visual cues. I added an appendix which discussed why 3D movies suck basically due to these issues.
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Wow so strange how peoples perception differs, it shows an un-tethered astronaut outside the space shuttle with the word NASA above.
To see this click on it and make it larger, try looking past the image for a few seconds, once it comes into view it's hard not to see it.
FWIW, I have a much easier time with the full-size image vs. the thumbnail - I'm able to lock in on the 3D effect almost immediately. The thumbnail doesn't overlap between my eyes properly, no matter what distance I view it from, so I only get a partial 3D image of the orbiter.
The image has to be sized such that when you look "past" it, the elements of the image "overlap" between your two eyes, which is where the 3D effect comes from.
Again, the offsets are chosen based on works for most people viewing it an assumed distance - outside of those assumptions, all bets are off.
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I wear glasses, and something I've noticed is that that this particular image goes out of focus when I try it with glasses on and it easily snaps back to normal view, while, without my glasses, it's in focus, quite a bit past when other images in my field of view of that depth are starting to get fuzzy, and I can hold it fairly well, even noticing a parallax effect as I subtly move my head from side to side.