Visual analogue of a Shepard tone
A Shepard tone is an auditory illusion that appears to indefinitely ascend or descend in pitch, without actually changing pitch at all.
Since 2D quasicrystals can be rendered as a sum of plane-waves, it is possible to form the analogue of a Shepard tone with these visual objects. Each plane wave is replaced with a collection of plane waves, at 2,4,8,16... etc times the spatial frequency of the original plane wave.
The relative amplitudes of the plane waves are set so that the spatial frequency stays approximately the same even as the underlying waves are scaled. The result is a quasicrystal that appears to zoom in or out indefinitely, without fundamentally changing in structure.
The infinite zoom effects creates a motion-fatigue optical illusion, which will cause illusory contraction of your visual field after staring at the GIF below:
More quasicrystal zoom GIFs can be found here. You can run and modify the code I used to generate these animation. Copy the following code into a file called QuasiZoom.java. Then, in a terminal, type "javac QuasiZoom.java" in the same directory, and then "java QuasiZoom". Various parameters to tune the output are noted in comments in the code. Then use Gimp to make an animated GIF.
import java.awt.Color; import java.awt.image.BufferedImage; import java.io.File; import java.io.IOException; import javax.imageio.ImageIO; import static java.lang.Math.*; public class QuasiZoom { // Defines a gaussian function. We will use this to define the // envelope of spatial frequencies public static double gaussian(double x) { return exp(-x*x/2)/sqrt(2*PI); } public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { int k = 5; //number of plane waves int stripes = 3; //number of stripes per wave int N = 500; //image size in pixels int divisions=40; //number of frames to divide the animation into int N2 = N/2; BufferedImage it = new BufferedImage(N, N, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB); //the range of different spatial frequencies int [] M=new int[]{1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256}; //the main ( central ) spatial frequency double mean=log(16); //the spread of the spatial frequency envelope double sigma=1; //counts the frames int ss=0; //iterate over spatial scales, scaling geometrically for (double sc=2.0; sc>1.0; sc/=pow(2,1./divisions)) { System.out.println("frame = "+ss); //adjust the wavelengths for the current spatial scale double [] m=new double[M.length]; for (int l=0; l<M.length; l++) m[l]=M[l]*sc; //modulate each wavelength by a gaussian envelop in log //frequency, centered around aforementioned mean with defined //standard deviation double sum=0; double [] W=new double[M.length]; for (int l=0; l<M.length; l++) { W[l]=gaussian((log(m[l])-mean)/sigma); sum+=W[l]; } sum*=k; for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < N; j++) { double x = j - N2, y = i - N2; //cartesian coordinates double C = 0; // accumulator // iterate over all k plane waves for (double t = 0; t < PI; t += PI / k){ //compute the phase of the plane wave double ph=(x*cos(t)+y*sin(t))*2*PI*stripes/N; //take a weighted sum over the different spatial scales for (int l=0; l<M.length; l++) C += (cos(ph*m[l]))*W[l]; } // convert the summed waves to a [0,1] interval // and then convert to [0,255] greyscale color C = min(1,max(0,(C*0.5+0.5)/sum)); int c = (int) (C * 255); it.setRGB(i, j, c | (c << 8) | (c << 16)); } } ImageIO.write(it, "png", new File("out"+(ss++)+".png")); } } }
