I feel like such an idiot. I read it like noise, as in added digital noise.
The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.
"particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there."
I too read it as noise. This happens to me very often these days , don't know if it's part of some cognitive decline :P
EDIT:
Another such HN headline misreading was when I read "The contribution of Cheese to western civilization" as "The contribution of Chinese to western civilization" .
Nope, I did "virtual noise, huh? Interesting. Wait, wasn't there an article the other day that added a nose to get rid of motion sickness as well? Hmm, does it actually say noise? Nope :/"
I'm not sure that is different. The perception part is still filling in what fits based on context. It takes your consciousness to tell the perception 'read again while suppressing spellcheck'.
Have you ever read the paragraph where every word is misspelled but people tend to be able to read with very little reduction in speed?
The mind takes many shortcuts when it reads. It's easy to read "digital nose" as "digital noise" since that's the more common phrase. This is little like how you can read words with their mddile lettres mispacled.
I had the exact same experience, only with one added bonus thought: "OK, so I don't see any noise. Middle of the image... Maybe they consider this weird shape to be noise for some reason? Hmmm, what is it anyway?" :)
I read the title to the the post here on HN. Then I read your comment, every bit of it, *except to the last line, when it finally hit me I was probably misreading the text and it said nose, not noise. This is all on top of me having had the same problem a week or two when this was reported here then. It's crazy how much of reading is whole word pattern recognition using context, and how weird it can get when it fails.
When I was scanning the headlines quickly on the front page I thought it was "noise" at first too - then I noticed the definite particle "a", felt that phrase seemed unusual ("a virtual noise"?) and saw "nose" when I focused.
I wonder if it's partly due to the proportional font... nose and noise look pretty distinct in a monospaced font because of the length difference.
Most of us are seeing the phrase "digital nose" for the first time.
Easy mix-up, everyone read it as "digital noise" and thought to themselves, "grainy screen? noise as in randomness of the input timing? that doesn't sound helpful."
The first image's caption said "note the massive nose in the middle of the game's frame" and I started looking for noise in the middle of each of the screens, as in: comparing the two images and see if I could spot the noise.
"particularly because the participants playing with the virtual nose didn’t even notice it was there."
Yeah, that's me not finding the nose.