Foundations to re-appear March 2006

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:47:38 -0500

It appears that Bela Julesz’ Foundations of Cyclopean Perception will arrive on bookshelves (and Amazon) at the end of March, 2006.

The story of this project is, like so many of my annoying stories, long and convoluted. It very likely started out at Pixar in 1987. I was in Loren Carpenter’s office and noticed a book with an interesting title (”Wha? Cyclops? Who?) on his shelf — it was Foundations. I pulled it off, scanned and became fascinated.

At a subsequent SIGGRAPH we presented a film, knickknack, that was in 3-D. For one of the sessions Loren whipped up some nice demos taken from the ideas in Foundations.

Flash forward to about 1992, I’m in graduate school, studying vision, and sitting in my advisor’s office when I noticed that same book as I had back at Pixar. I ‘borrowed’ it, and actually returned it a few years later.

Then, in 2000, a student (Martin Voshell) and I go to Rutgers to participate in Professor Julesz’ festschrift. During the talks, Ken Nakayama bemoans the demise of availability of the book. I had always wanted a copy and saw that as an opportunity to check Bookfinder.com for availability, and, surely enough, there were a few to be found — at about $300 used!

I got in touch with the celebration organizer, Thomas Papathomas, and suggested that we urge Professor Julesz to pursue reprinting it. We knew it wasn’t going to be particularly easy, the original had been printed by University of Chicago Press in 1971 and, surely, all the source material had been ‘dearchived’ by then. Coincidentally, it had just been named to the list of most-influential cognitive science books in the 20th century, and, as a design nerd, I had also discovered that it had won a book design award.

With Professor Julesz’ permission and cooperation,Thomas and I wrote a proposal that was shopped to various publishers — but primarily to those we thought could do the reprint justice.

This process gave rise to literally years of legal wrangling with various entities and subsequent publisher negotiations. In the mean time Dr. Julesz’ became quite ill and passed away. I was honored to have him in attendance at a talk I gave at Rutgers in the Fall of 2001. It was there he gave me a signed copy of the original book that I cherish.

As the work progressed and the legal hoops were jumped, my main job was recreation of all of the color figures, several of the black & white images. Thomas made the corrections found by others in the earlier printings, and we wrote a new preface. The image creation took quite a bit of effort as there was no original ‘source’ material available, other than the original book.

I think we ended up doing the book justice and, as such, I am quite excited to have been associated with it. In all honesty, we could have done even better but we wanted to see the book out the door in this decade…

Neither Thomas or I are reaping any financial benefit from this printing. All proceeds are going to a fund to endow a speaker series in Prof. Julesz’ honor at Rutgers.

Amazon has it available here.
(nb. This link contains a reference to my ‘Associates’ account, giving me a dollar or so if you buy it.)

On Registration

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:46:58 -0500

I overheard an interesting comment from one of the pressmen re: registration (making sure that each color layer lines up with the others in traditional printing). He pointed out that this was probably the first job he’s ever done where you don’t want the colors to register.

Above is an example of figure 1.0-1 with the colors precisely registered. Notice that the central figure is rather obvious when all the colors register. Your visual system isn’t really sensitive to the misalignment in the ‘real’ images so they’re taken out of register by 1-2 picture elements to keep them visually interesting and ambiguous.

Figure 1.0-1 - RG Anaglyph

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 18:41:55 -0500

These are designed for the glasses that came with the book - ie Red over the left eye

Figure 1.0-1 - Cinematogram

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 12:08:40 -0500

This is a ‘cinematogram’ from Foundations.

Figure 1.0-1 - Cross Fuse Pair

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 12:04:27 -0500

This is figure 1.0-1, re-arranged into cross fused layout (i.e. the right image is on the left…)