I’m getting really excited about a project I’m working on that will visually compare the way various animals see their habitat. This is part of a Digital Education Innovation grant I received from Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Below is an example of a comparison between songbird vision and human vision of the same forest habitat. Songbirds have an extra cone-type that allows them to see in ultraviolet. Also, they have about 240 degrees field of view compared to our 190. But, our range of binocular vision is about 40 degrees, fully twice that of songbirds.

These images were made by stacking two separate panoramas composited from about 75 images each. I took one pano in UV and one in visible spectrum, then layered them for a false-color bird’s-eye-view of the world.

Oh, and here is a sweet gif showing UV verses visible light images.