P3D Re: The Imagination Effect

[wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob Wier)]

>My questions for the people who are "perceiving" stereo in two dimensional
>images are: How much depth do you see? Do you ever see hyper-views? If you
>are used to making hyper-views will you then see hyper-views?
>
>My comment is: If someone can teach me how to do this maybe I won't need to
>actually make 2 photographs each time I make a stereograph. Maybe I can just
>go back to regular photography. And then maybe I can learn to just see the
>image in my mind without actually using any camera at all. Reminds me of an
>idea a friend and I kicked around for awhile. We'd have a photo book with no
>actual images, just a description of each one at the bottom of each blank
>page.
>
>Sounds like the emperor's new photography to me.
>
>David Lee

Yeah - in my case, as I indicated, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't
experienced
it. To add a bit more detail - just as there is a different sense of
reality (for most
people) between waking reality and dreaming, there is a textural differance
between
"seeing" 3D and analyzing clues in 2D images to understand 3D spatial
relationships.
I know that occasionaly my "real" 3D sense would kick in, and I'd see things in
3D from a 2D surface. Now, I should point out that these were pretty transitory
effects, just lasting a few moments, not minutes on end. And interestingly
enough,
they were always from television - not in flat print media (which I hadn't
thought
about before). That leads me to think that perhaps the effect is more strongly
tied to Pufritch and possible the 30 frame per second flicker that you get
with NTSC
video than was initially apparent.

I've experienced another dimension (slight pun) in stereo vision where there is
actually a hyper effect - I saw this most strongly in driving down the
Interstate
south of Salt Lake City. The highway parallels the Wasatch mountain range for a
considerable number of miles. As there aren't a lot of trees, you get a good
view of the mountains off to the East. Moving south at about 60 mph, I
could look
(briefly!) over at the mountains with both eyes open, and get a sense of
the rounded
character of the shapes which is absent with regular stereo vision because
of the
short baseline. I'm assuming again it's something like Prufritch, where there is
stereo processing going on in the brain in discrete quanta, so that one image is
processed after another, but since these are separated by more than normal
spacing
(because of the vehicular motion) it results in a hyper effect. It *is*
dependent on
weather conditions, though, with the light angle and presence or absence of
clouds
as a background affecting the intensity.

Lastly, I've observed in the spring when the trees are starting to bud out, but
with leaves small enough that you can still see "through" the crown, that
driving past
also give me a rounded sense of hyper depth. In fact, the whole upper part
of the
tree seems to rotate a bit as I drive past, which I assume is a perceptial
conflict
between the nearer branches "moving past" more rapidly than those on the other
side of the tree. Since I know that the tree can't actually be moving, the only
other interpretation is that the object is rotating in place (equally
unlikely, except
in one of those Texas tornados!).

FWIW --

              Bob Wier
     mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   11:39 PM Sunday, November 1, 1998
        Unix/Internet Administrator
   Rocky Mountain College, Billings MT.
 keeper of the Photo-3d and Overland-Trails
mailing lists and the USA GPS Waypoint server



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