Heehee - nothing constructive to add here, but thanks, Poi, for reminding me of the joys of my old 520STFM. I wanna' download Steem now, just for the blast.
From: Rochester, New York, USA Insane since: May 2000
posted 03-14-2007 22:15
Kimson, after watching it a while I think I have an answer for you.
When you are focused on the star field, (i.e. looking straight at it) you will tend to focus on individual stars. When you do this you will perceive the motion to be slower because the movement of your eyes is approaching the speed of the object.
A good example of this would be when you look out your car window at the car next to you, and they do not seem to be moving all that fast, even though both of you are traveling at 120kph. The same situation while you are standing on the sidewalk and a car shoots past you at 120kph the car seems to be going pretty damn fast.
When you are looking away two things are happening. The first, you are not following the motion so you are perceiving the actual speed of the elements. The second, which I am hard pushed to explain, comes from multiple elements following similar paths. Since you are not following a single element, you will see only pieces of the movement of many different elements, as such it will look almost like a blur of motion. Even though the individual element is moving at a near constant speed, the multiple elements being tracked as one make it seem faster and more frantic.
Thanks WarMage, it makes sense
poi: I like it too, and I forfot to tell you that I had not been able to watch your former examples for some reason, but now it works!
Nice pieces of work - I assume, as I am not a coder but I can see the file size !
When you are staring directly at the centre of the starfield, as all stars are travelling away from that point in various directions, I would hazard that your brain is attempting to percieve the average velocity of those points. While you are conscious of the motion, the average velocity of those points is essentially near zero - subtract the velocity of one star from a star moving in the opposite direction, for instance. Finally, the starting velocity of each star is low (zero?) at this point. What you get is an impression of 'expansion', rather than 'speed'.
When staring at an area off-centre, the stars in that part of the field are generally moving in the same direction. Now, the average velocity of those stars is definitely a substantial positive number, and the application of acceleration means that any individual star is moving faster in relation to its starting velocity anyway, further enhancing the percieved velocity for the simple fact that their relative velocities increasingly diverge towards the outer edges of the field.
Going further; moving the eye to a point off-screen gives you a clear view only of the nearest stars, all approaching their terminal velocity as they near the edge of the field. All the stars you are immediately conscious-of are travelling fast, and the general impression is of one (lower density) moving field.
Perhaps I'm not explaining this adequately, but it works for me.
Nice example of a wonderful optical illusion there, Bmud - but I'm afraid that it's a completely different phenomenon.
I had a great little proggie once that placed a slowly revolving spiral on one's screen. Having stared at it for a while (30secs or so), anything one looked at would appear to contract/expand (depending upon the direction of rotation) for a few seconds afterward.
The starfield velocity problem is not a motion after-effect. It's more like a 'looming' phenomenon.
btw poi, just wanted to let you know that all your pc demo links dont work for me. they redirect me to ie http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=29240
which ends in a 404 .
mas: Strange, I just tried and the download link of Asahikawa works. It worked regardless of the browser ( Op9, IE6, FF2, NN4, Lynx ).
[edit] Oh, I guess you're talking about the fact that on my site most of my prods' link their respective sheet on Pouet. I do so to try and get a few thumbs up ... I guess it's more of an annoyance for people unfamiliar with Pouet.net. I'll look into adding direct links. [/edit]
However the host of my group's former site, planet_d.net, is no more. Therefore my group's old prods ( the ones I released in the mid-late 90's ) are mostly unavailable.
... it's been a while since my last prod, I should work on something. Even if that's just a byte-tro.
posted 02-25-2007 19:02
