The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers • Hacker News Board

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#51

Post by anonoholic » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:06 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #50

atoav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment. This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat…

> I am sure they didn’t simulate that They actually might, after arc-shaped reflective buildings started almost literally melting cars that happened to be parked in the focus of the reflected sunlight, and some constructs had to be built in the line of that sunlight to protect the cars. https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-me... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675 https://www.dail…

Apparently not. The same architect had previously designed the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, which suffered from the same problem. Apparently no lessons were learned.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-vdara-death-ray-hotel-is...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vdara

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#52

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:08 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #48

atoav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment. This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat…

Ok, but at least they could have gathered a little more evidence.

Meh, it's just a blog post with overstated claims: I'd say the amount of evidence is in line with the typical startup stories posted on HN.

The thing I find most interesting is how strongly people want to defend boring glass facades.

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#53

Post by mcv » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:14 AM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #49

I love 4 WTC, for some reason its extra-mirrory, really tall with a flat roof, from the street it often looks like it disappears. https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a21247... https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e6... https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e87...

I can't help but wonder how much of this is influenced by the lighting and composition of the photo. Both your examples and those in the article.

I'm generally not a fan of the all-glass architecture, or even modern architecture in general, and prefer buildings made of stone, and preferably on a human scale, like 19th and early 20th century architecture. After the War, buildings became featureless and soulless, and when architects started making them look good from a distance or from the sky, and not up close. Designed to look good as a model but not something for real people to live in.

Recent years have fortunately seen a return to more sensible architecture.

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#54

Post by Havoc » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

Feels like the wrong conclusion in submission title to me. Glass buildings are by their nature quite uniform & featureless.

...of course the brain looks elsewhere.

And I don't think it's a given that it's a bad thing either. If you think about an ocean - people tend to look at the horizon not stare at the fairly uniform ocean surface. Nothing wrong with the ocean surface though

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#55

Post by tomxor » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #50

atoav wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment. This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat…

> I am sure they didn’t simulate that They actually might, after arc-shaped reflective buildings started almost literally melting cars that happened to be parked in the focus of the reflected sunlight, and some constructs had to be built in the line of that sunlight to protect the cars. https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-me... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675 https://www.dail…

In the city I live, there is a small building with a relatively new parabolic glass front that focuses roughly onto the pavement in front - in the winter it's rather pleasant to walk through, the summer not so much. This is only a small effect though, I imagine with larger buildings it's never desirable.

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#56

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:28 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #43

brador wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They strapped people with a headset that tracks their eyes and told them to look at something. The brain will naturally then try to find the special thing the wearer thinks the researchers want them to look at to get a good result. Probably the sky, not the boring buildings.

no. they used a smartphone app that is trying to predict where people would look.

It's a smartphone app in the same sense that any app frontend is a smartphone app: a not very relevant sense.

You can find some more details in their validation study: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#57

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

creato wrote: post #18

rsj_hn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author shows how for more classical buildings with more structure, the eye focus on the structural aspects of the buildings.

No, the author shows that some random computer vision tool focuses on more structural aspects of the buildings. Assuming that is related at all to what "the eye" does is ridiculous.

Assuming that a tool explicitly created to simulate visual human behaviour would do exactly that doesn't seem very strange.

You can look at their validation study, it does ok: http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#58

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

acchow wrote: post #14

In the first photo, it seems more like the glass facade camouflages with the sky which gives an illusion of more nature and less artificial construction.

There's not much nature there, it's just empty sky. For simple comparison of what gives a stronger nature experience, just go out into a field and compare looking straight up to looking out across the field

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#59

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:35 AM UTC

reggie44 wrote: post #9

The article keeps using the word 'ignore'. The brain is not ignoring the buildings, its just looking at them more subliminally.

No, the claim is explicitly that the fast visual processing parts of the brain (the subliminal processing) decides the eye should focus on something other than the buildings. That's quite clearly within the reasonable interpretation of "ignore".

Re: The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers

#60

Post by SiempreViernes » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:39 AM UTC

gfaure wrote: post #29

praptak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the article makes this claim. It's not about people actually ignoring the skyscrapers, but rather the low-level layers of the brain tagging them as not worth looking at. This sounds plausible - glassy skyscrapers look a lot like the sky, which isn't very interesting to look at.

No, this is wrong. In reality there's no link between the claim in the article and the way that the human visual system processes its input. The article is trying to make a leap between the output of some algorithm, and what the human visual system does. Meaningless.

3M put out a validation study[1] of their algorithm, an algorithm explicitly created to simulate what the eye does, and it seems to do ok compared to real eye tracking data in the example shown.

Where is your evidence that it was all completely faked?

[1] http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-atte...