The following is a collection of outside resources I frequently use in my Sensation & Perception class at NDSU. First, you'll find several links to some digital materials that I often incorporate into class to complement the hands-on analog demos described here. Second, you'll see a selection of research articles that I've found some combination of fun or useful in terms of thinking about analog materials and their role in vision science.
Did I miss something? Please get in touch if you have a suggestion for something I should include here!
Links to online resources for Vision Science instruction
https://michaelbach.de/ot/ - Dr. Michael Bach's Visual Illusion page. Well over a hundred digital implementations of different illusions with easy controls for changing stimulus parameters.
http://illusionoftheyear.com/ - The Neural Correlate Society's "Best Illusion of the Year" competition. There are new illusions each year, including some striking re-imaginings of known effects.
https://www.pakin.org/~scott/stereograms/ - Stereogram experiments by Scott Pakin. This is a wonderfully creative collection of experimental stereograms that incorporate a number of elegant and surprising effects including emergent illumination and binocular hue cancellation.
http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/histogram_compression-ECVP2021-ShowTime.html - Akiyoshi Kitaoka's JavaScript tool for creating color illusions via histogram compression. Make your own "no red pixels" images!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw6nBWo21Zk - Hubel and Wiesel's videos of simple, complex, and hypercomplex cells. Hard to beat these for illustrating visual receptive field properties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIevCFZixIg - An LGN On-center cell. Another good demonstration of receptive field properties.
https://www.boredpanda.com/animal-camouflage-39/ - Examples of animal camouflage. Just a fun collection of different animals blending into their surroundings. This is usually a good way to motivate discussions of texture and material perception, or perceptual organization.
http://www.papercraftsquare.com/tag/impossible-object - Paper models of impossible objects. These can be a fun complement to lectures about object recognition, especially in the context of non-accidental properties.
http://brain.danbirman.com/ - A nice interactive demo that simulates recording from multiple visual areas while simple stimuli are presented across the visual field.
http://vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckImage.php - A color-blindness simulator that can be applied to images or websites.
https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ - Another color-blindness simulator.
https://colormax.org/color-blind-test/ - Quick Ishihara plate test - not the full set, but useful to illustrate the basic idea.
https://www.crumplab.com/cognition/textbook/ - Matt Crump's "Instances of Cognition" open textbook, with slides, etc. for teachers.
https://www.biomotionlab.ca/demos/ - Biological Motion demos from Dr. Niko Troje's lab at York University.
https://libguides.princeton.edu/facedatabases - A face database library hosted by the Princeton Libraries. Lots of dbs that could be useful for student projects or building your own short experiments.
https://generated.photos/face-generator - a face generator for making realistic face images. Could be useful for student explorations of face space.
http://bigwww.epfl.ch/demo/ip/demos/FFT-filtering/ - This is a nice widget for playing with bandpass spatial frequency filtering.
https://samstrongvision.com/visual-fields-activity/ - Excellent activity from Dr. Sam Strong about the relationship between the eyes, the visual fields, and cortical visual processing.
https://www.djmannion.net/img_freq_web - Image explorer for visualizing the frequency domain (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/neural/neural_sim/neural_sim.html) - Simulation tool for examining neural responses in early vision (courtesy of Damien Mannion)
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/colour/scene/colour.html - Colour vision conceptual overview (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/measuring_perception/measuring_perception/ - Motion and Signal Detection Theory tutorial (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://webutils.psy.unsw.edu.au/psyc2071_2020/neural/brightness_task/brightness_task.html - Brightness illusion task and psychometric function fitting (courtesy of Damien Mannion).
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aharley/vis/conv/ - More fun with convolutional neural networks: This widget allows you to draw your own numeral to see how different layers of a CNN respond and categorize your writing.
https://mark-kramer.github.io/Case-Studies-Python/01.html - A fantastic (and free) virtual textbook for learning to use Python by analyzing neural data in Jupyter notebooks. Not vision science specifically, but too useful to not post here!
https://kidsphysics.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/dice.pdf - A nice depth and motion illusion from Rob Ives.
Articles for S&P students (and instructors)
A number of these are behind paywalls (which I regret), but these are all papers that either include some fun aspect of vision science that I think undergraduate students will appreciate or highlight interesting analog effects that are easy to use as a starting point for your own project development.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159121001258 - "If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus)" - This is a lovely paper about using citizen science and simple analog tools to examine illusory contour perception in cats.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/p281115 - "Fooling the eyes: Trompe L'Oeil and Reverse Perspective" - Nicholas Wade and Patrick Hughes discuss "reverspective" stimuli in this paper and provide an easily constructed paper template so you can make your own.
https://www.osapublishing.org/opn/abstract.cfm?uri=opn-2-5-58 - "The blue arcs: an electrifying visual phenomenon." - An accessible description of how to see Purkinje's blue arcs and why they appear.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10454935/ - "Close encounters - an artist shows that size affects shape." - A short commentary on the visual properties of artist Chuck Close's portraits.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12075887/ - "Naive optics: understanding the geometry of mirror reflections" - I ask my students to learn how to use the Law of Reflection to calculate where light will go after bouncing off of a mirror, but even so they often have some erroneous folk beliefs about how this works. This paper is a nice examination of some of the relevant issues.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12094435/ - "Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception: Adults' belief in visual emissions." - An interesting study of adults' folk belief that something exits the eye to make vision possible.
https://jake.vision/blog/motion-illusions - "Motion Illusions" - From Jacob Yates, an excellent primer about visual motion processing with an exceptionally clear analysis of a class of motion illusions that were making the social media rounds in 2020-2021.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1068/p5042?journalCode=peca - "A ping-pong ball camera obscura." - You can make a pinhole camera out of all kinds of things, but it turns out that ping-pong balls are one of the more convenient.