The evolution of eyes
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150518-jumping-s...
I have a couple as pets (https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/how-i-ended-up-with-pet-ju...) and sometimes have managed to get them interested in videos of other bugs but I'd like to develop something geared just towards them. There are a couple of things like this used in the lab, but nothing open sourced that I know of.
(It's not necessarily true, but worth thinking about.)
A hypothetical perfectly-realistic CG rendering would need to be perfectly realistic to animals as well as humans. Then you "capture" the realistic rendering using a virtual camera, which happens to look real for humans.
It's computationally infeasible, but the strategy seems correct.
(No one has ever achieved a perfectly realistic 100% synthetic video of complex scenes. It's good to keep such mountains on your radar -- someone will conquer it one day, but how? Could it be you?)
That's not necessarily a true assumption - unless you mean realistic as in an exact light-propagation simulator, not realistic as in fooling humans. On the nanometer-scale there are things that happen with refraction that would probably be more accurately done if using wavelengths and photon energy as the units, start-to-finish. But at the end of the day, the models we use for rendering are already extremely effective - the uncanny valley arises with how we use them.
> No one has ever achieved a perfectly realistic 100% synthetic video of complex scenes
I get what you're saying, but that's a little bit subjective, like the turing test. Some people see some CGI scenes in movies and are shocked to find out they weren't real. Some people see a real scene and complain about how bad the CGI is! An interesting litmus test is Moff Tarkin. Some people were shocked they found a perfect lookalike, and had no clue it was CG. Some people were apalled at how poorly it was done.
- 100% CG: no mixing in real life footage.
- video. No still frames.
- reasonably complex scenes. Think nature documentary.
- reasonably long: 30 seconds or more.
- not a degenerate scene: it would be bogus if the camera was fixed, staring at a tree stump.
The overall thrust of these criteria is that no one, anywhere, has achieved fully realistic CG video. And this is easy to demonstrate. If we had that capability, you'd be able to fool people in a double blind test so that they wouldn't be able to pick out real video from fakes any better than random chance. In a scientific setting, a nature video will wipe the floor with our best CG video ten out of ten times.
I believe the technology already is at a point for us to do this. The technology isn't the barrier to meet your criteria as much as the attention to detail. For a rendered video scene to look good, the main issue is the animation.
Still image renders are already at the point of fooling humans if enough time went into it. Then the remaining issue is the animation. Animation requires incredible attention to detail - some of which can be improved by a more nuanced understanding of the physics involved (eg water simulation or bird flight).
> no one, anywhere, has achieved fully realistic CG video
According to your specific criteria for realistic CG video.
But I still would argue the technology is already there. They just haven't made your video yet because realistic CG is done in movies. And movies aren't prioritizing meeting that specific criteria. But the talent and technology is there.
What about scenes like this from the Jungle Book?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yKWQ24rF8
Of course it breaks your rubric for having the boy be real. But get rid of the boy, and less stylized setting (high saturation and fog and smooth tracking camera), people would absolutely be fooled in at least some of the scenes in that clip.
> In a scientific setting, a nature video will wipe the floor with our best CG video ten out of ten times.
Okay
I also play with them and get them to chase a laser pointer, being careful to keep it away from their eyes.
Also, I hate to be "that guy" but I found a few grammatical errors towards the end of your post. The first being with "No, not poisonous, but all spiders produced venom..."(produced > produce) and "Their are no jumping spiders that have venom"(Their > There). /grammar policing over :P Otherwise awesome article, thanks for the inspiration!
Well, you hate them (and snakes) because evolutionary you're supposed to [for survival].
Interesting, IIRC mantis shrimp are considered one of the more intelligent forms of arthropod. Perhaps it's just not the correct sensory system to communicate with them through. Evolution is certainly capable of honing an organ system's acuity independently from the organism's brain/CNS.
On a related note, it's amazing how many times eyes have seemed to independently evolve. And once they do occur in a species, it takes a lot of evolutionary pressure to get rid of them. Troglobites or stygobites generally still have atrophied vestigial eyes, despite being adapted to a purely subterranean environment. It would seem with the relatively stable ecosystem a cave would provide, stabilizing selection over a long while would select for no eyes. However vestigial eyes are still common, which I suspect implies the metabolic cost to fitness ratio of eyes must be strongly in favor of having eyes, even if barely functional.
Biology as a field is riddled with these definition based problems, because the phenomena it's used to describe are just so intricate. Another similar problem is the "species problem," where we find countless attempts at an objective and universal definition for differentiating species, but little consensus.
In the case of mantis shrimp it's probably the stimulus being too foreign to the organism for it to have a meaningful response, like you said. So it's probably just ignoring the stimulus until it to goes away.
It may also be the organism's adaptation to an environment with many diverse predators (like a shallow water reef would have). So any unusual stimulus is automatically interpreted as threatening. If they have a tendency to freeze when exposed to acute stress, it may just be their manifestation of the fight-or-flight response. This could probably be measured by comparing nervous system arousal between threatening and foreign stimulus.
Because it has all the failed methods for training them that never got published. Some of them are unintentionally hilarious too. > In our laboratory, we also used sprays of water as an aversive stimulus—spiders that moved into one side of an arena received a spray of water. In pilot trials, there was no evidence of learning: spiders ran wildly when sprayed and then stopped to groom themselves. If accidentally sprayed too heavily, they became trapped by the water droplet.
I think more papers like this should exist.
And yet some claim that eyes couldn't have evolved, in the face of so much evidence.
Look at the champion of the anti-vaccine movement, the "progressive" Jenny McCarthy. (And they gave her a seat on The View!) Stupidity knows no race or creed.
Have you been able to breed them?
It turns out our eyes vibrate a bit(~80HZ) to get a higher information density by injecting noise, increasing sampling above the discrete quantization[1]. His theory is that 48FPS ends up being really close to the nyquist limit and wreaks all sorts of havok on how we process the film.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/69748/using-...
We are very ingrained in having forward facing sight, I think the mere idea of having eyes in a different position is pretty incomprehensible to us
What we _think_ we see and what we're actually seeing seems to be quite different. We both see more and see less than we believe. I imagine more eyes might significantly increase that complexity and nuance.
It's pretty cool seeing a much younger energetic Richard Dawkins talk about how the eye evolved multiple times.