About Lightscapes

Lightscapes is an optical sensing application that measures the brightness of reflected light to produce a three-dimensional landscape of a captured space. Lightscapes allows you to view and examine the world in a new perspective, making the unseen visible. It allows you to deconstruct a space to its most basic element – light.

Our vision is based on the way that we interpret information from visible light. Our vision allows us to distinguish objects, perceive depth and colour and to recognise the world we inhabit. Lightscapes aims at challenging our perceptions and our vision; to visualise a space as the light that reflects from objects and not the objects within a space.

The application has similarities with human visual perception, in the way that light is reflected from objects and then captured and analysed by the eye/camera. However, the main difference between the machine vision and human vision is in the method of processing the captured light. The application is only able to recognise the varying intensities of light and not the objects within a space.

The application processes the intensity of the light on a per-pixel basis; analysing and then measuring the brightness values. It then creates a dynamic array of values which are continually updated thirty times per second. These brightness values are extremely valuable to the system as they provide a dynamic variable which can be translated to form a new image of the captured space.

The output of the application is the production of geometrical landscapes of the captured image. The user is able to manipulate their view on the landscape by rotating the landscape in a three-dimensional environment.