As said in the CBS News video, the difference between children's toys and adults' is the price. The team is not only doing an amazing, never seen before job, but they are actually having fun, marvelling at what they observe and record, just as we do.
When will all humans cherish, protect, respect, all animals all over the planet?
And for those who prefer fiction (especially in tricky 3D) here is the scenario: With far more sophisticated equipments, aliens have stuffed our planet, having fun watching us each saturday night (if they have a saturday, that is).
Super Spy Cams Film Cute Baby Polar Bear - Polar Bear: Spy on the ice.
Incredible rare footage of a baby polar bear in the wild, filmed using specialist spy cameras. Narrated by David Tennant.
Clever Polar Bear Stalks Seal - Polar Bear: Spy On The Ice.
Can you hear the unhearable? Can you see the unseeable?
Common sens says no, adding "of course not".
Well check this out as it might give you access to what you thought impossible, therefore enrich your cerebral connections, and perhaps widen your fields of perception.
New camera makes seeing the "invisible" possible
"A group of researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla has developed a handheld camera that uses microwave signals to non-destructively peek inside materials and structures in real time." MissouriSandT
"Impossible colors are hues that can only be perceived under specific conditions. Examples of impossible colors are bluish-yellow and reddish-green. This does not mean the muddy brown color created when mixing red and green paints, or the green color from yellow and blue, but completely unique "new" colors." wikipedia.org
Have you ever seen the color bluish yellow?
Some people may be able to see the color "yellow-blue" in this image. Allow your eyes to cross until both + symbols are on top of each other.
A graph or how the brain interprets color.
Hue scale 0—360°
Scientific America
"Impossible" Colors: See Hues That Can't Exist
"Red and green are called opponent colors because people normally cannot see redness and greenness simultaneously in a single color. The same is true for yellow and blue.
Researchers have long regarded color opponency to be hardwired in the brain, completely forbidding perception of reddish green or yellowish blue.
Under special circumstances, though, people can see the “forbidden” colors, suggesting that color opponency in the brain has a softwired stage that can be disabled.
In flickering light, people see a variety of geometric hallucinations with properties suggestive of a geometric opponency that pits concentric circles in opposition to fan shapes."
Early cave art researcher Henri Breuil copied this image of overlapping bison and mammoth from the walls of Font-de-Gaume in France.
Unlike other bison-mammoths that depict two distinct but overlapping images, this carving from a spear-thrower features one image that can be seen two different ways. Above, the artifact in its natural state. Below, red ovals highlight the position of the two eyes.
The two sides of a figurine from a site near Cambrai show very different details. On one side (left), the high back leg and short front leg are characteristic of depictions of bison. On the other, the tall straight front leg and grooves depicting long hair in the midriff are typical of mammoths. (Image courtesy of Duncan Caldwell)
Optical Camouflage built with Kinect and Openframeworks
"..Takayuki Fukatsu, a Japanese coder who works under the name Art & Mobile, has done a bit of trickery with Kinect and openFrameworks. The peripheral will still track your movement and position, but turns your image nearly transparent..."
"The Ponzo illusion is an optical illusion that was first demonstrated by the Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo (1882-1960) in 1913.
He suggested that the human mind judges an object's size based on its background.
He showed this by drawing two identical lines across a pair of converging lines, similar to railway tracks.
The upper line looks longer because we interpret the converging sides according to linear perspective as parallel lines receding into the distance.
In this context, we interpret the upper line as though it were farther away, so we see it as longer – a farther object would have to be longer than a nearer one for both to produce retinal images of the same size."
Camouflage is a well known, well understood way of protecting yourself, blending with the environment and remaining static. But nature has invented another opposite solution: if you can't hide, show yourself...too much and move fast. Optic art as a way to survive!
Arthur Shapiro's Illusions and Demonstrations for Vision Research
Just read the description carefully, or you won’t understand. Look at the flashing small circles in the center of the larger ones.
They flash differently, don’t they? When one is white, the other is black. Right?
Well, no. Click on "Add/remove surrounds” and watch how they actually flash.
I didn’t believe it at first. I even took a screenshot ...
Anyway, they flash at the same time and have the same color when flashing.
"If you stare for a long time at a large coloured image and then glance at a white background, you'll see the same image appear, but in its complementary colours. That's because the receptors in the eye that pick up the image's colour have become tired and surrounding receptors that haven't been used take over. While this effect is well-known, Yuval Barkan and Hedva Spitzer from Tel-Aviv University recently demonstrated the first example of a related illusion that causes the background colour to linger in a different part of the image. In the Coloured Dove illusion (see below), a white dove appears on a coloured background. When the background is switched to white, the dove takes on a paler version of the original surrounding colour. The team hasn't yet figured out exactly why this happens. One theory is that the dove has actually taken on the background's complementary colour from the beginning, although we fail to perceive it until the background colour disappears."
Interactive Movie -CURBALL - by Arthur Shapiro
"If you look directly at the "spinning" ball in this illusion by Arthur Shapiro, it appears to fall straight down. But if you look to one side, the ball appears to curve to one side. The ball appears to swerve because our peripheral vision system cannot process all of its features independently. Instead, our brains combine the downward motion of the ball and its leftward spin to create the impression of a curve. Line-of-sight (or foveal) vision, on the other hand, can extract all the information from the ball's movement, which is why the curve disappears when you view the ball dead-on."
CONTRAST COLOUR
"If you stare at this rotating circle, you should see three concentric circles: pink, blue and green. But when the circle stops moving, you can see that the arcs that create these circles are actually all black."
