Bio Motion Labs

The Exploratorium team is working with Professor Nicolaus Troje, an intriguing researcher from Queens University, Ontario, Canada who is the Research Chair in Vision and Behavioral Sciences. His team is working on several aspects of visual perception and cognition. Their interest is focused on questions concerning the biology and psychology of social recognition. That is:

. detection of animate agents

. conspecific recognition

. gender recognition

. individual recognition

. recognition of an agent’s actions

. recognition of emotions, personality traits and intentionality

. face recognition

The work is interesting to us at the Exploratorium because it is very much grounded in perception; not What but How we see what we see. Dr. Troje is a remarkable character and his work has redefined research on biological motion perception and turned it from a curiosity into a field that is today covered in any text book and any classroom on visual perception.

We’ve posted this link before, but it’s worth a second look. We’re prototyping ways people can match each other’s body language and better understand the way we perceive and process the world around us.