Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This App Trains You to See Farther

popularmechanics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#31

Post by mistercow »

oakwhiz wrote: post #8

The image that they show reminds me of the way that the 2D discrete cosine transform works. http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/imgs/512/312/2680596/2680596_pone.0... It looks similar to this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dctjpeg....

It's called a "Gabor patch", and it's constructed by multiplying a 1D sine wave by a 2D gaussian window (it's the sine wave that's reminding you of the basis functions of the 2D DCT).

You'll see these all over the place if you read studies about vision. The (highly oversimplified) reason is that if you imagine the edge-detection processes of a mammalian brain as a set of filters, the impulse response of one of those filters would be a Gabor patch.

This is related to why the DCT is so effective for vision applications, although perhaps less significantly than you might imagine just by looking at the patterns.

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#32

Post by crazygringo »

Ugh, their website doesn't even explain what platforms it works on. Their home page, about page, and FAQ don't mention it at all.

Their purchase page has mysterious Apple and Windows icons, with a message saying "Is Now Available on the iPad".

But is there a Windows version, which the Windows icon would suggest? Or is it Windows Phone? OSX version? Web version? It says "Available on the App Store", but on my iPhone I can't find it.

And if it's only available for iPad, it doesn't even make sense that the site has a purchase page.

http://ultimeyesvision.com/purchase.php

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#35

Post by cjensen »

It's an interesting effect, if it exists.

A researcher charging money for an app based on an effect which he has not finished studying -- no blind study yet -- is a really... odd... thing to do in my opinion. Were it me, I wouldn't charge before the blind study is done.

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#37

Post by mkl »

13throwaway wrote: post #5

Open source javascript clone. https://rawgithub.com/Fordi/eyegame/master/eyes.html

This is neat. Some issues I spotted: spot-0.png doesn't seem to be a Gabor stimulus pattern (see http://www.cogsci.nl/software/online-gabor-patch-generator), the "press F11" and "Click to begin" messages don't go away (and sometimes going fullscreen is impossible/undesirable anyway).

For people wanting to look at the code it's at https://github.com/Fordi/eyegame

Also, what's the license?

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#38

Post by staunch »

> "When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball"

Bah! That's not a knife. This is a knife: twitch FPS gaming. Quake Live at 250 FPS, refreshed at 144hz, with any day.

Interestingly, my vision is extremely good. I've often surprised people with how far I can see clearly. So screw this app: learn how to play a twitch FPS well: http://www.quakelive.com/

Re: This App Trains You to See Farther

#39

Post by cjensen »

staunch wrote: post #38

> " When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball" Bah! That's not a knife. This is a knife: twitch FPS gaming. Quake Live at 250 FPS, refreshed at 144hz, with any day . Interestingly, my vision is extremely good. I…

You would lose the bet :-)

Keep in mind that the ball is coming straight on, and the batter must discern trajectory (rising, falling) and spin (which affects how the ball curves) and velocity quickly enough that you still have time to move the bat.

For example, a fastball and a changeup both drop at the same rate and spin at the same rate. One is coming at 100mph, the other at 75. Since the ball is heading straight for you, you must perceive speed by measuring how quickly the ball is moving through your eye focus.

Worse, you are expected to bat in an intentional direction. Meaning that you have to hit the ball on an precise spot in the sphere with an intentional amount of force. It's not enough to just swing hard. I'd guess the bat has to be in the right location with a time accuracy of less than a millisecond.

The good batters make good money for a reason.

Post reply on HN