Robot Readable World

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Apparently this is an 'experiment in found machine vision footage' by Timo Arnall Go look at the original page on vimeo to see all the sources.

Quick and dirty reaction? What you can see here are visualisations systems of meaning. How a particular form of meaning (what is important, what should be tracked, what can be disregarded, what is never-seen-in-the-first-place) is built up from computer processes. No system of meaning can encompass every detail of the world, so they have to be selective. Our systems of meaning limit what we can see. There's no perception with some cognition.

I don't know how similar this is to human vision, obviously we don't have glowing boxes around human faces (at least I don't). But we do have some similar biological/cognitive tricks, such as lateral inhibition. I also don't know if these visual traces are the result of programmed or evolutionary algorithms.

It might be my imagination, but there's something like a child's drawing to some of these images. You know how a child draws 'a house' as a red box with a blue roof, with smoke coming from the chimney, even when they live in a flat with central heating? The red box moving down the street? That's a 'car'.

Finally, I do wonder how many of these technologies use this sort of aesthetic visualisation because this is how surveillance systems have been depicted on film and tv for years now. Compare the above, with Mark Coleran's showreel (which I love).


Coleran Reel 2008.06 HD from Mark Coleran on Vimeo.