Course materials for UCL module COMP0160
As part of this lab you will act as a test subject in a number of simple visual psychophysics experiments. The experiments run in your web browser.
Privacy note: You will be given the opportunity to download your results in CSV format. Your data is not otherwise stored or used in any way except for local presentation to you.
Not all of these are strictly experiments — in the sense of collecting data — but they will hopefully be useful illustrations of some of the concepts discussed in the visual perception lecture.
We’ll run the following test collectively on the main screen, rather than in your browser.
In between experiments we’ll also look at a few optical illusions, which tend to pick at the rough edges of some of the perceptual hacks the brain uses to construct our otherwise apparently seamless visual reality.
These are handy when you’re doing UI design or visualisation work, to help guide your colour choices, but they’re also interesting to play with in their own right to get a better understanding of the parameters of colour vision. It can be quite illuminating to just poke around these tools and see what they tell you.
I was going to include some examples of terrible visualisation, but honestly you should just spend 10 minutes scrolling through the Data Is Ugly subreddit instead.
Here are some things to think about while doing the activities, and also when looking through the data download afterwards. There will be opportunities during the session to discuss these and any other points that may occur to you.