No Subject

[aifxtony@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tony Alderson)]

>Joel Bass wrote (digest 2935):
>Okay, here's an odd little question, but one y'all might find enjoyable:
>How would one's vision be different if one's eyes were stacked VERTICALLY
>rather than being arranged horizontally on one's face? <

Assuming the world was the same, I really can't think why things would look
different at all.  Although some things would be different (i.e., we would
worry about breaking the stereo window on the horizontal edges instead of
the vertical) the depth information would be the same.

However, I think the world would probably be very different for us to have
vertically displaced eyes. Horizontal displacement has independently
evolved several times on earth, I'm not aware of any creature with
vertically displaced eyes. This seems to indicate some sort of selection
preference.  Another universe would look different because the physics
would be different, not so much because eyes were vertically displaced.

But consider a related question: how would the world look if we saw in some
other way than visible light? Some kind of three dimensional perception
would still be useful. What if we 'saw' with sonar? Or heat? Or some other
part of the electromagnetic spectrum? How does the world look to an ant,
that "sees" mainly by feel and smell?

In a related posting, Ray Zone summarized the VISIDEP story. Ray is
remarkably charitable. I don't want to be mean to McLaurin, as I have met
him and he is a nice guy, quite sincere in his stereo enthusiasm. He has
made useful contributions (such as organizing academic conferences, and
authoring many articles). But this process is mainly of academic interest;
the attempt to promote it commercially bordered on the ridiculous (but
that's not unusual in this business! ;-)  ).

When this came out, I dubbed it "jittervision" and "pogoscope" because the
vertical cycling was so annoying. While you really can get a 3-D effect out
of the process, the jittering is intolerable for prolonged viewing,
especially since the 3-D effect seems to diminish over time. But it does
demonstrate something interesting about the way we process visual
information, especially about the relationship between motion parallax and
stereopsis.

It makes me consider that persons with only one eye are not nearly as
depth-deprived as one might first think.

Tony Alderson
aifxtony@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



------------------------------