Author Archives: Spencer Garrett

Fetch’s Anamorphic Projection

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So, this perhaps may be the nerdiest blog post of the year, because it deals with a really cool detail in a video game called Infamous: Second Son. In the mission, you are finding clues about a rogue character named Fetch who has special powers, because you want to find her and absorb them for your own use. Her power is the ability to manipulate neon energy for use as a weapon and a way to be very mobile throughout the city. The clue search takes you to a hideout inside an advertisement sign and here you take various photos about Fetch’s personal life. She accidentally killed her brother Brent over drug use and wants to avenge him by killing drug dealers, so one of the clues is a neon viewpoint of his face that she created. However, this viewpoint is not any regular viewpoint but actually an Anamorphic projection.

Accidental viewpoints are viewing positions that produce a regular image not seen in the real world. The way that the retinal images align in our eyes, the image appears in a way that it is not seen at other angles. This comes back to the theme that an infinite number of images in space can create the same images on our retina and in our brain at various angles and viewpoints. Now, what is seen in Infamous may not be a true Anamorphic projection, since this view is seen from above and not necessarily uses linear prospective as a monocular clue. Still, this is an accidental viewpoint and instead of the image looking normal at all other angles but one, this image looks strange at all angles but one. There are 3 separate images in different parts of the viewpoint. One is located right where the person is standing and the other two are located in spots down below on a rooftop and the street. When the main character takes the picture for the clue, he needs to move to a position where the 3 pictures align perfectly to see the normal image.

This was very awesome to see the first time playing, because immediately I recognized this as an accidental viewpoint relating to the ideas we talked about in class. It was very interesting that video game developers would use an aspect like this in a video game although it is probably much easier to produce art like this in a video game rather in real life.

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Images from YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHTTw36VQOo&list=PLs1-UdHIwbo6msTIJm0OtY_GKjt5r92AK

 

Where at THON is Jesse?

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Every February Penn State’s Dance Marathon or “THON” packs thousands of people into the Bryce Jordan Center in order to dance for children with pediatric cancer, and this year I was on a committee called DAR or Donor Alumni Relations. Our committee gives mostly tours and often we have a lot of down time to simply go into the stands and watch THON casually together. Each of the tours crosses the floor twice once in the beginning of the tour and once near the end. People on tours can become astray in the crowd easily, and it can be very hard sometimes to locate lost donors, parents, and in our case committee members. Unfortunately, one girl was lost we will call her “Jesse” to protect the privacy of the individual, and one tour guide simply mentioned that she didn’t return to the concourse and no one has been able to find her on the floor.

During downtime, many of the committee members were in the upper bowl of the BJC watching THON, and we were trying to locate her if possible. One of my friend’s called our search “Where at THON is Jesse” in honor of the game “Where is Waldo”. It was very fitting, because in the sea of hundreds of dancers, moralers, and pass list holders we were looking for one specific person. Be it as it may, the moment that my friend mentioned trying to find her, I see her in the upper right corner of the floor standing with what seemed to be two other dancers. I told everyone the approximate location where I saw her with some context clues, and they immediately began to see her as well. How is it that humans can notice people so far away but also mixed with a large crowd?

This phenomenon is weird, because in reality the brain only sees detail from a very small portion of the retina called the fovea. The retina is located in the back of the eye and contains photo receptors that converts light images into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.  You see less and less detail the further the object’s images is from the fovea. If you extend your arm at full length and take a look at the width of your thumb, that is on average the size of your fovea. This is the only portion of your perceived surroundings that you can see in detail at a particular time. The human eye moves constantly, so that is why it appears we have full detail of everything all the time. Additionally, there are theories that humans recognize objects by a list of features and shapes that are stored in memory. Jesse was wearing a blue THON 2014 DAR committee shirt, she has brown skin, and she has very long black hair. Using these features and the fact that many objects on the floor were far enough away that their whole image was the size of our thumb, or lied entirely on our fovea, we were actually able to recognize people very far away in the large dancer crowd. Later, it was confirmed by one of our captains that it was indeed Jesse on the floor who we had spotted.