Liquid stimuli generation

JanJaap.VanAssen — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 13:22:06 +0000

During my PhD I spend quite some time setting up a technical pipeline to generate stable, precise and realistic liquid stimuli. To be able to do this I followed a three months internship in Madrid at Next Limit. Here I learned to work with their particle simulation program RealFlow made for the VFX industry.

The computational costs of these stimuli are quite high. I wrote specific scripts to distribute the calculations over various systems and the university cluster. Over 50.000 images were generated showing liquids over time, with different viscosities and with different optical material appearances.

A video showing an overview of some of the stimuli used in my studies can be seen here.

Fluid viscosity

JanJaap.VanAssen — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 15:29:15 +0000

I started working for the PRISM training network on July 1st as a PhD student. I will research how we perceive liquids and especially the viscosity of that liquid. I’m working on this for four months now and time flies.Immediately I started working on a small research project to see how perceived viscosity varies over time. This was perfect to see which tools and knowledge is needed to set up an experiment researching fluid viscosity. The workflow of each department and supervisor (in my case Roland Fleming) is also different and this was a nice way to be introduced to all this.The trip to Bordeaux was very nice. Nice food, nice drinks and interesting talks by people who are interested in the same work (un)related topics. I learned a few new things and really started to think where I want to go with my viscosity research. It was nice being introduced to all my colleagues and I now have faces linked to the names that pop up in my mailbox.In my career development plan I wrote down some of the ideas I was brooding on during Bordeaux and I think the result is a clear and logical plan of attack:

Map as many possible properties/manipulations that can influence the perception of fluid viscosity and represent this in a stimulus grid.
Specify discrimination performance of fluid viscosity perception.
Research the influence of expectations/priors on the perception of fluid viscosity.
Research distinctive visual characteristics of the fluid and its relation to the perceived viscosity.

So I better get started.

Fluids

Liquid stimuli generation

Fluid viscosity