Simulating animal vision?

Please make this experiment on yourself and tell us if your brains got rewired :P
I would really like to know the answer to your question.

I would if I knew how to develop anything, haha, but if anyone can teach me how, I'd gladly do the experiment. :)

Check out Dog's Life, a PS2 game in which you played.. a dog. I never actually played the game but I remember it having some interesting ideas like "seeing" smells.

Would love to see some VR games that try this. Imagine being able to control a cat, or a shark, or a bird! Truly feeling their sense of perspective and scale would be awesome.

Although to re-wire the brains natural perception would probably require staying in the VR environment all day for weeks on end.

Only problem is, getting a sense for what an animal really experiences would be pretty complicated.

Not to mention that if they have senses we do not, how would you deal with that?

(Several insects for instance can see UV light - That's all well and good, but they can do this because they have a 4th colour receptor; So they see colour + UV - There's no reasonable way to simulate seeing an entire extra 'colour' which the human visual system cannot... A lot of information would get lost along the way....)

You could try simulating the vision of a crow. They have eyes aimed more toward the sides of their head, When they look they see out of one eye then switch to the other eye. I also read that they they see opposite brightness of humans, what we see as bright they see as dark and vice versa. So when they see other crows they appear silver to them.

I think it could be a very interesting simulation.

That's what I'm thinking, we don't need a scientific simulation, we just need to base the experiences on what we currently understand about animal vision, and of course we can experiment with types of vision that we havn't found in nature.

It could be really cool if someone made a demo where you are a Bat flying around and the world lit up every time you made a ultrasound screech.

- or -

Maybe another cool demo would be a spider climbing around on your web with some kind of multi eyed spider vision and every time there is a vibration on your web something could light up like a wave of light coming from the disturbance area.

The possibilities are endless :-)

I did research in acoustics and one thing that always interested me was simulating animal hearing and vision.

As dogs have ears that are oriented differently and can even move... think of this -
our ears are set in place. We don't have to live process position of sound relative to position/orientation of our ears.
Movable ears adds a lot of needed brain computational power.

In my research I used highspeed (think super slow motion) cameras to observe the plucking of harpsichord strings.
I used those cameras to film alot of things though and my thoughts from how animals deal with sound input led me to think of animal vision also. This also has been an interest of mine.

One thing to consider in animal vision is the brain processing. For instance... does a duck with eyes on opposite sides of head process one image from the two? I don't think it see's in stereo. Is it actually paying attention to two seperate viewports into the real world or somehow integrating them into one in a different way than we do.

Insects - with compound eyes and many of them (sometimes) how can this method of vision be simulated and explored. Lots of fun there.

Speed of vision in other animals - a hawk or eagle have very sharp vision. They must therefore process images much faster than us or in a different way. A hawk or eagle can see prey on ground from far away... that is some serious resolution! Say we have for sake of argument 5 megapixel eyes... then these birds must have closer to 20 megapixel eyes (effectively at least).

They must not only process these images quickly to pick out the prey... but they attack and dive so fast that they must be able to process moving images very quickly also! Therefore birds might see "faster" than humans as well as at higher resolution and also a different eye positioning.

It's amazing to see small birds and insects look around when viewed in slow motion. You can see the thinking and processing is going on in those tiny brains. To us at human speeds they seem to just skitter around and bounce about spastically... but they do interpret vision and stuff very quickly and adjust movements very accurately. Just soo darned fast to us that we cant relate. At 1200 fps a wasp can be seen to look where it is placing it's next front foot step... and carefully placing and establishing a good foothold.

POINT IS! - if you want to simulate animal vision... think about adjusting the virtual world in your simulation to perceiving time faster or slower depending on how the animal might process visual information differently than humans.

Good example. If birds and insects see "faster" than us... our 30 and 60 hz tv's probably look like a slow slide show to them. Old incandescent bulbs and florescent lights could be seen to pulse at AC frequencies... barely fast enough to fool humans into thinking they are steady constant brightness lights... but with faster animal vision and our light bulbs look like pulsing lights!

Imagine a insect vision simulation where time is adjusted... humans would be SO slow... not to mention their technology! TV's would look really weird as they refreshed the images so slow and all human light would pulse on and off all the time! Even LED's would flicker as they are usually PWM'ed and outdoor LED displays would look a mess!

If there is interest in some video about vision perception and time... I can film some stuff and post it.

Good idea though... i likey a lot!