Human Lights

Arbour lights

Amongst the theoreticians there was a subspecies who interacted with experimentalists — these theorists tried to make sure that their ideas were testable and that someone tested them. Preeminent amongst these was Francis Crick who wrote all the quotes above shown in red italics (taken from Crick’s autobiographical book What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery; Basic Books, New ...

Bezier Lights

In this paper we introduce Bezier Lights, an intelligent lighting system that allows users to intuitively establish virtual boundaries in indoor environments. Boundaries can be easily created/modified by arranging the layouts of disk-shaped devices (“stones”) on the building floor. The immediate purpose of the system is to assist users in incorporating location-aware capabilities into private p...

Global Night-Time Lights for Observing Human Activity

We present a concept for a small satellite mission to make systematic, global observations of night-time lights with spatial resolution suitable for discerning the extent, type and density of human settlements. The observations will also allow better understanding of fine scale fossil fuel CO2 emission distribution. The NASA Earth Science Decadal Survey recommends more focus on direct observati...

Where are the Lights? Measuring the Accuracy of Human Vision

In real life, light sources are frequently not present in our view field. However human vision is able to infer the illumination just by observing its effect on visible objects (serving as lightprobes) or, inverting the idea, it is able to spot an object which is incoherently lit in a composition. These lightprobes have been used by computer algorithms in the same manner to detect lights, mimic...

Lights out.