A way of transforming digital images so they better reflect how our eyes actually see things could make video games seem more realistic.
When you look up at a gigantic moon and try to snap a picture of it, it tends to look far smaller in the photo than you might expect. This is because eyes and brains process images in a different way to cameras and computers.
When representing three-dimensional space on a flat screen, computer graphics rely on an approach developed by Renaissance artists called linear perspective. It gives the illusion of depth by making parallel lines in a scene converge as they get further away, resulting in distant objects seeming smaller.
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But human vision doesn鈥檛 work like that, says at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. Each eye projects light onto a curved retina, and their joint field of view is much wider than a photograph or computer screen. Objects in the centre of our focus also appear bigger and more detailed than those in our peripheral vision, which is why we perceive the moon as larger than it seems in photos.
So Pepperell and his colleagues have developed software to customise images using a mathematical model that mimics how the brain 鈥渂ends light鈥� and dynamically alters a scene鈥檚 geometry. They enrolled 195 people and showed them images from a game called Hammer 2 that were either presented in the default linear perspective version or adjusted using the software so they were in natural perspective.
Participants had to guess how far away a target ball shown in the game was in 72 images in the different formats and with a field of view of varying widths. The ball could be at one of six possible distances.
The researchers scored participants on whether they under or overestimated the distance to the ball. They found that people often overestimated distances, but were better at guessing them in natural perspective than they were in linear perspective. The effect was larger the wider the field of view got.
at the Catholic University of Maule in Chile says the results tally with聽her own work showing that聽. But she says that as the participants in the new study still overestimated distances, this suggests the software doesn鈥檛 entirely eliminate the problem.
Pepperell says perspective tweaks like this could make video games and CGI movies more immersive and could help in training simulators and architectural models where distance perception can be crucial. The researchers are commercialising the software through a start-up called .
鈥淎s we become more dependent on these media, it鈥檚 important that they鈥檙e doing a better job of representing what we鈥檙e actually going to experience,鈥� he says.
Because the authors used still images, it is uncertain if the technique would work in interactive virtual environments where the point of view changes, says Saracini.
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