Figure 6: Video still from Watching and Dreaming (2001: A Space Odyssey). The perceptual reconstruction (right) resembles the visual stimulus (left). The perceptual image is constructed from percepts (clusters of visual information) learned through the machine’s process of watching the film. During waking, percepts most similar to current stimulus are activated, resulting in this resemblance. Perception does not exactly match stimulus because these percepts represent a greater diversity of visual material that diverges from the specificity of the current stimulus.
The image is clearly divided down the middle, creating a left side and a right side. Left side: close-up of a man's head and shoulders. He wears a uniform and is hunched forward. Right side: the same man is recognizable, but fragmented into blocks of color. The man is abstracted such that the details of his eyes are missing, and facial features are smoothed over. There are additional blocky color fragments that do not correlate to anything in the left-side image.