Had a good day yesterday, just the sort of day I like. Had very productive meetings with my collaborator Claire, PhD student Paul and research assistant James. And in between, I even managed to do some more on my paper.

With Claire, we did some maths to figure out how Claire wants luminance to vary in her stimuli, and then managed to get that happening on her CRS Visage system. It’s the first time I’ve played with a CRS system, and it took me out of my Psychophysics Toolbox comfort zone, but it was very satisfying that we managed to get it doing what we wanted, and just in time for lunch at that.

Later on, Paul and I sat down and started sketching out some experiments which might be good for his MRes project. I’ve always really liked Vishwanath, Girshick & Banks (2005) “Why pictures look right when viewed from the wrong place.” Nat Neurosci 8(10): 1401-1410, and was lucky enough to get Marty up here a couple of years ago giving a seminar on it and other work. So I suggested to Paul last week that we might start kicking some ideas around in that general area. It’s always fun to start sketching out a new set of experiments – the bright shiny optimistic time before the inevitable disillusionment sets in after you’ve been working on them for months and just encountering one difficulty after another!

Finally, James showed me his latest work on his 3D smartphone app. It’s looking really good and it seems that we may be able to get around the need to figure out how to do anti-aliasing on an Android phone, which would be handy.

It’s great to have such stimulating people to work with.