Blog
Neuroscientists in Newcastle
18/11/2013
I've done enough talks to feel confident that, being the world authority on Me and My Work, as long as I have a logically ordered and explicative mass of images I can launch into My Talk without my knees knocking. It wasn't till I was standing in front of my audience in the Neuroscience Institute at Newcastle University that I felt the audience probably had a collective IQ reaching into the thousands, and that my own was perhaps on a level with the mantises they study.
I had come to Newcastle to meet Jenny Reid, Reader in Vision Science at the Institute of Neuroscience. I wanted to discover more about her special thing, 3D vision in all its manifestations, to add a contemporary aspect to my piece-meal knowledge of optics. As Jenny described anamorphic projection and the possibility of projecting onto an actual, in-the-world space, I felt my brain contorting like a pretzel in an effort to comprehend.
Mantoids are favoured friends to Jenny and her colleagues because of their stereoscopic vision which is now known to be wider-spread in the animal world than used to be thought. One of her colleagues showed me a photo of his mantis wearing a minuscule pair of specs on its great spherical eyes, and the platform the mantis perches on when watching 3D telly, its head twirling as it follows the images.
My next move is a field trip to see 'Gravity'; to get in touch with Norwich art school's games department, and to make a preparatory 'landscape' to be rendered into 3D.
I had come to Newcastle to meet Jenny Reid, Reader in Vision Science at the Institute of Neuroscience. I wanted to discover more about her special thing, 3D vision in all its manifestations, to add a contemporary aspect to my piece-meal knowledge of optics. As Jenny described anamorphic projection and the possibility of projecting onto an actual, in-the-world space, I felt my brain contorting like a pretzel in an effort to comprehend.
Mantoids are favoured friends to Jenny and her colleagues because of their stereoscopic vision which is now known to be wider-spread in the animal world than used to be thought. One of her colleagues showed me a photo of his mantis wearing a minuscule pair of specs on its great spherical eyes, and the platform the mantis perches on when watching 3D telly, its head twirling as it follows the images.
My next move is a field trip to see 'Gravity'; to get in touch with Norwich art school's games department, and to make a preparatory 'landscape' to be rendered into 3D.
