A very enlightening course this afternoon about the way knowledge of the human visual system can be applied to several aspects of computer graphics. For example, the course went though different notions that might help in directing the viewer's attention to certain parts of an image.
Part of the course (talk by Marty Banks from UC Berkeley) focused on stereoscopic displays. Among other things, he highlighted a problem with stereoscopic displays that I wasn't aware of: the decoupling of convergence and accomodation. When watching a real-world scene, the eyes converge and focus on the same point. With a stereoscopic display, the eyes always focus on the screen but converge at different distances depending on the content of the images. That's what makes it difficult and tiring to watch objects that are too far off the screen. Banks has built many psychophysics experiments to highlight weaknesses of stereo displays and he suggests techniques to compensate for them.
Human visual perception is a topic to which the computer graphics community should pay more attention.
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