Textures: The fascination of apparent textures

Abstract

In this review, we have drawn attention as designers to how often we come across textures, what their characteristics and variables are, and how interesting it can be to consider their use. In tackling this topic, we have drawn only the basis from Psychophysics because it is perhaps the only neuro-science that has explored the topic of textures in great detail. It addressed, among other things, the threshold aspects, evaluating, by means of laboratory experiments on human subjects, what the characteristics of a texture should be in order for detection, segregation and segmentation, edge detection, where certain texture features end up, and the detection of the demarcation limits between one texture and another; the detection capabilities of a texture were tested as certain characteristics such as luminance, colour, contrast, orientation and density of textons varied. Why has Psychophysics been so concerned with textures? In this paper we try to give a two-step answer. In the first, the discriminating elements of a scene are colour, shape and surface texture. If the surface structure is one of the three discriminating elements of the scene, this can only prove its importance. The second phase analyses glossiness and how it affects the perception of objects and the scene.