Brussels blog round up for 17– 23 November: Budget troubles, France is downgraded, and are European young farmers facing extinction?

Chris Gilson and Stuart A Brown take a look at the week in Brussels blogging

Cue combination for 3D location judgements

Cue combination rules have often been applied to the perception of surface shape but not to judgements of object location. Here, we used immersive virtual reality to explore the relationship between different cues to distance. Participants viewed a virtual scene and judged the change in distance of an object presented in two intervals, where the scene changed in size between intervals (by a factor of between 0.25 and 4). We measured thresholds for detecting a change in object distance when there were only 'physical' (stereo and motion parallax) or 'texture-based' cues (independent of the scale of the scene) and used these to predict biases in a distance matching task. Under a range of conditions, in which the viewing distance and position of the tarte relative to other objects was varied, the ration of 'physical' to 'texture-based' thresholds was a good predictor of biases in the distance matching task. The cue combination approach, which successfully accounts for our data, relies on quite different principles from those underlying geometric reconstruction

An automated calibration method for non-see-through head mounted displays

Accurate calibration of a head mounted display (HMD) is essential both for research on the visual system and for realistic interaction with virtual objects. Yet, existing calibration methods are time consuming and depend on human judgements, making them error prone, and are often limited to optical see-through HMDs. Building on our existing approach to HMD calibration Gilson et al. (2008), we show here how it is possible to calibrate a non-see-through HMD. A camera is placed inside a HMD displaying an image of a regular grid, which is captured by the camera. The HMD is then removed and the camera, which remains fixed in position, is used to capture images of a tracked calibration object in multiple positions. The centroids of the markers on the calibration object are recovered and their locations re-expressed in relation to the HMD grid. This allows established camera calibration techniques to be used to recover estimates of the HMD display's intrinsic parameters (width, height, focal length) and extrinsic parameters (optic centre and orientation of the principal ray). We calibrated a HMD in this manner and report the magnitude of the errors between real image features and reprojected features. Our calibration method produces low reprojection errors without the need for error-prone human judgements

View-based modelling of human visual navigation errors

View-based and Cartesian representations provide rival accounts of visual navigation in humans, and here we explore possible models for the view-based case. A visual “homing” experiment was undertaken by human participants in immersive virtual reality. The distributions of end-point errors on the ground plane differed significantly in shape and extent depending on visual landmark configuration and relative goal location. A model based on simple visual cues captures important characteristics of these distributions. Augmenting visual features to include 3D elements such as stereo and motion parallax result in a set of models that describe the data accurately, demonstrating the effectiveness of a view-based approach

voxEUROPP Episode 2: Eastern Europe and Democracy

Today EUROPP launches the second episode in our voxEUROPP series of podcasts. Presented by Chris Gilson and Stuart A Brown, voxEUROPP draws on academic experts from EUROPP to discuss the latest issues across European governance, economics, politics, culture and society, both at the European Union and national levels

Creditor Control in Financially Distressed Firms: Empirical Evidence

In this Article we present the results of empirical research that examines how creditor control is manifested in financially troubled firms that have to renegotiate their debt contracts

Five minutes with Saskia Sassen: “The issue right now is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies; it’s the financialisation of everything”

Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless

Five minutes with William Outhwaite: “The chic ultra-right populism of Geert Wilders and others is certainly worrying”

As part of our on-going Thinkers on Europe series, EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson spoke to Professor of Sociology William Outhwaite about the EU’s democratic deficit, the rise of the far-right, and whether sociologists should do more to engage with the subject of European integration

Five minutes with Jeffrey C. Alexander: “Southern European countries are not just experiencing an economic crisis, but also an identity crisis”

Is there a ‘dark side’ to European modernity? As part of our ‘Thinkers on Europe’ series, EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson spoke to Jeffrey C. Alexander about his views on modernity, the European integration process, and the importance of cultural and political symbols to European democracy