Lab #1 - Geometric Optics

Lab #1 - Light and Optics

The next step is to try and get a handle on more of the behaviors that light can exhibit. To do this, I'm going to ask you to go take a look at the exercises described in Lab #1 at the following link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WXTseRsX24tXQcKq03ZqWHXq7IqGIuTt/view

This will take you to a PDF document describing a series of things to try doing what a few different materials that I hope you may be able to scare up in one form or another. If you need help finding some of these, I recommend visiting https://laserclassroom.com and checking out their selection of light sources, lenses, and prisms.

Once you have what you need, try making some of the observations described in the lab exercise to see what light can do in different circumstances. The next post will be about describing what we see, so even if you can't do the exercises on your own, you can keep reading to find out what we learn from playing around with light this way.

Comments

Monocular cues for depth perception

Monocular cues for depth perception In our last post, we discussed how you can use the information from your two eyes to estimate the relative depth of objects in the visual field. Both vergence and binocular disparity provided cues to where objects were situated in depth relative some fixation point, allowing us to obtain some information about the 3D arrangement of objects in space. Clearly, two eyes are helpful in resolving the ambiguity that follows from projecting the light coming from a three-dimensional scene onto a two-dimensional surface. We said that this projection of light onto the retina made it much harder to make good guesses about depth from one image, and that using two images was a necessary step towards making it possible for you to recover this information from the retinal data. However, consider the picture below: Figure 1 - A boid in some trees. Some things here look closer to you than others, but how do you tell that when you don't have bino...

Lab #4 - Observing retinal inhomgeneities

Lab #4 - Observing retinal inhomgeneities Back-to-back lab activities, but there's a method to the madness: In this set of exercises, you'll make a series of observations designed to show off how your ability to see depends on which part of your retina you're trying to see with. Here's a link to the lab document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VwIY1bDNF4CI4CUVaY5WSvQ0HxF9Mn6Y/view When you're done here, we're ready to start saying more about the retina and how it works. Our next posts will be all about developing a model that we can use to describe the retina's contribution to your vision quantitatively, so get ready to calculate some stuff!

What is Light?

What is light (and what does it do?) To begin talking about vision, we need to talk about light. What I mean is that we need to work out a way of thinking about what light is as a physical stimulus so that we can understand how it interacts with the physiology in our eye and brain. Our goal is to come up with a description of what light is that I’ll be calling a model . A good model allows us to account for some properties of a complex system and predict how it should behave under different circumstances. Good models also frequently leave out some aspects of a complex system in favor of being easier to work with, which means we have to remember that our descriptions of complex systems have limits. For now, we’ll have a limited set of phenomena that we’re trying to understand, but even so we’ll see that we’re leaving out some properties of light that are physically meaningful in some circumstances, but not terribly meaningful given our physiology. What is light?...

Seeing and Perceiving

Search This Blog