Pixelization Experiment

The pixelization experiment tries to obtain a measurement of the sensorial information that a person needs to develop, in a practical form, its surroundings. In our case, it is tried to measure the amount of visual reconnaissance that we needed to make this task.

The obtained results have direct application in the EAV project. The amount of information that will have to handle the generating system of sounds will have to be, approximately, the minimum amount of visual information that we find necessary to evolve in the surroundings.

In order to make the experiment, images with two different cameras are captured. These cameras are used as "eyes", so all the information is captured through them. The images provided by the cameras are captured with a card PCMCIA and they go to the RAM memory of a laptop. Once these tasks are made, we process the images. The processing consists of reducing the resolution of the images (something similar to if we tried to make a very great zoom in a digitized image) and of reducing the amount of gray levels, since the human eye is not able to distinguish between very near levels of gray and for that reason we considered opportune to study in what way this parameter affects to the perception of our surroundings.

A commercial Head Mounted Display is used, model VFX3D of Virtual Reality Systems, with a VGA signal separator (Linbox) of the same factory. The CCD Marshall cameras have analogical exit of NTSC type and are fixed, by means of a metallic support, to the Head Mounted Display, located to the height of the eyes.

The processed images are projected in the LCD screens of the Head Mounted Display.

During the experiment we can display images with different resolutions (512x512 píxeles, 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32, 16x16 and 8x8) and different gray levels (256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, and 2). These parameters are selected from the software developed specifically for this experiment.