Re: Pulfrich effect

[P3D William Carter <wc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Crowell writes:

>"Someone recently pointed out to me an interesting variation of
>the Pulfrich effect."
>"When you're riding along on a freeway, you look out the side window & 
>put a dark filter over one eye."
>"Depending on which eye you cover, you appear to be either moving
>very quickly past a large, distant scene or more slowly past a
>small, near scene."
>
>"I haven't tried this, but logically if you had a dark enough
>filter it should be possible to get the depths to reverse..."

A friend and I tried something similar this a year or so ago. We'd taken 
the train south to Santa Barbara from Berkeley. In the Club Car, we ran 
into a group of German thespians. They found we were on a 3-D related 
business trip, which then became a topic of broad interest. I pulled out 
a contrast viewing filter, (much like a dark sun glass lens) and 
instructed one of our foreign guests to put it over his left eye and to 
look out the window (facing west). He literally screamed with delight! 
To make a GREAT story short, every soul (with sun glasses or not) in or 
entering that Car that after noon was soon exploring the Pulfrich 
effect.

This experience leads me to believe:

Short term hyper-stereo information trades extended Z-axis information 
for the prejudice of scale.

The opposite corollary is, unlike the opening preposition, short term 
hypo-stereo renders itself flat and time independent. No new 
information.

Therefore, although Pulfrich demonstrated an exciting physiological time 
delay/3-D neural mechanism, I do not believe it penetrates and/or 
effectually touches our perceptual conceptions of time.

Finally, for all you '60s acid heads out there, try looking out the back 
window while dampening one eye's input! THAT will put your brain to the 
test!


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