Blog

Development log for Scrutinizer — vision science, shader engineering, and the space between.

• 2026-03-21 Release
  Isotropic Cortical Sampling
  FOVI-derived isotropic cortical sectors as default geometry. Displacement pipeline now parameterized by cortical sector extent.
• 2026-03-16 Tech Brief
  Peripheral Color: From Cliff to Gradient
  12-band DoG chromatic decomposition, swatch-aware preservation, and a biological desaturation ramp validated against Bowers 2025, Hansen 2009, and Mullen & Kingdom 2002.
• 2026-03-13 Release
  Where Your Eyes Actually Read
  Scrutinizer v2.4.0 models Rayner's asymmetric perceptual span — shifting the foveal protection zone in the reading direction during horizontal pursuit over text.
• 2026-03-11 Release
  Five Decades to Real Time
  Scrutinizer catches up from 1970s acuity models to the Texture Tiling Model with a WebGPU compute pipeline for real-time metamer synthesis — now the default rendering path. Two WGSL passes, ~900 lines, under 0.3ms, and the Oklab metrics to validate it.
• 2026-03-09 Release
  The Oblique Effect
  Orientation-selective peripheral blur. Cardinal edges survive further than diagonal ones.
• 2026-03-08 Release
  Measuring the Pipeline
  Five-wave psychophysical validation against published data. 8 half-octave DoG bands for smoother peripheral blur transitions. Halverson mixed-density crowding. Three shader bugs found by measurement.
• 2026-03-07 Release
  See What Your Periphery Computes
  Minecraft and Eyeball modes render the CMF pipeline as visible geometry. Blueprint wireframes from live ARIA. Density-gated crowding, Bowers 2025 chromatic recalibration, 10 modes.
• 2026-03-04 Release
  Color Persists in the Periphery: Even Where You're Not Looking
  Per-channel chromatic pooling replaces uniform desaturation. RG/YV decay with size-dependent preservation via DoG bands. Congestion-gated pooling, crowding diagnostics, headless audit CLI.
• 2026-03-03 Release
  Scrutinizer v1.8: Scientific Accuracy Audit & Feature Congestion
  Linear M-scaling replaces geometric cutoffs, E2 recalibrated, approximate Laplacian pyramid qualified. Feature Congestion ships as a real-time visual clutter metric with interactive ComplexityHUD.
• 2026-03 Tech Brief
  Measuring What Your Eyes Can't Ignore
  Running Rosenholtz's Feature Congestion on live web pages. The fixed-σ discovery, congestion vs. saliency, and validation against the MIT reference implementation.
• 2026-03 Tech Brief
  How GPU MIP Chains Simulate Peripheral Vision
  Interactive explainer: how Scrutinizer maps retinal ganglion cell receptive fields to GPU MIP levels, with DoG band decomposition and an eccentricity demo you can feel.
• 2026-02-28 Release
  Scrutinizer v1.6 & v1.7: Abstracting and Reading the Latest Science
  DoG peripheral reconstruction, de-monolith refactor, FOVI cortical magnification comparison, and why blue survives in the periphery.
• 2026-01-30 Release
  Scrutinizer v1.5: Mobile Emulation & Academic Tooling
  Device profiles for mobile simulation, touch emulation, and citation-ready image exports for academic reproducibility.
• 2025-12-13 Release
  Scrutinizer v1.4: MIP Pooling, Oklab Saliency & Inhibition of Return
  Hardware MIP-map pooling replaces Gaussian blur for biologically accurate peripheral rendering. Saliency migrates to Oklab color space.