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Lecture 11: Radiometry & Photometry (3)
smsunarto

One cool thing I thought of: Since light is a wave, that means that it might be possible for the wavelength (and therefore the color!) to be manipulated via the Doppler Effect.

Turns out it's an actual thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Doppler_effect

AadithSrinivasan

Adding onto the previous comment it is particularly interesting to note the Doppler effect on light near extreme phenomenon such as black holes where time "behind" an observer drifting to a black hole seems to be getting slower since they are moving away faster and faster (approaching the speed of light) as they descend closer towards the black hole. It's pretty spooky and eerily close to time travel.

gowenong

Are there any considerations of viewing light as a wavelength vs. a particle in applications of graphics? Inspired by the double-slit experiment result

Stafftancik

@gowenong Yep! If you wanted to accurately simulate a prism you would need the lights wavelength to properly calculate the wavelength dependent refraction using Snells law.

adityaramkumar

I'm wondering if it's possible to phase shift other wavelengths onto the visible spectrum too. It would be interesting to hence "see" IR/UV/XRays and so on the same way we see the normal visible spectrum.

ashvindhawan

@adityatamkumar, that's a really interesting question. You should take a look at this Quora link which talks about using the Doppler effect to potentially "see" UV rays: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-chance-for-UV-light-to-get-converted-into-visible-light-due-to-the-Doppler-effect-in-outer-space As the answerer describes, there would be no change in properties, just a change in perception and as such, I don't believe you would see anything unique

nobugnohair

mantis shrimp has 16 color-receptive cones while human has only 3, which means they can detect 10 times more colors than human. They can also detect polarization. I wonder what visible spectrum looks like in the world of mantis shrimp...

shreyaskompalli

@nobugnohair That's super fascinating; even imagining a world in more than just the colors we can see doesn't really compute in my mind. It would also be interesting to think about what a good graphics system for a mantis shrimp would look like! It seems like their visible spectrum just includes a wider range of wavelengths than ours, so perhaps it would just be more vibrant and saturated?

melodysifry

Tagging on to the above comments about mantis shrimp- even though we wouldn't be able to visually detect these differences ourselves, would it be possible, based on just our conceptual/abstract understanding of the visual system of the mantis shrimp, to computer-generate images meant to be viewed by mantis shrimp that have features only visible to the shrimp's eye but not ours? We can definitely render images with color differences that are real but too subtle to be seen by the human eye, but are our methods/screens powerful enough to do such a thing? I wonder how we might even test whether a mantis shrimp can see something on the screen that we can't.

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