Re:Suitability of telescope oculars for stereoscopes

[T3D Larry Berlin <lberlin@xxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Homer writes:
>I have not photosensitized the inside of a ping-pong ball but I once made a
>model eye from one by cutting a hole in it and fixing a lens to it .You
>could then view from the back the sort of inverted reversed and distorted
>image that the brain has to process to get the view of the world that we
>are familiar with
>.......
>I have thought along similar lines myself to what extent does the curved
>surface of the retina enable the eyes to get away with toing-in without
>because it curves around to meet the outer rays unlike the flat surface of
>a film. Or is it the brain again that corrects the distortion

*******  The mind processes it easily because no matter how distorted the
actual sensory input, it is identical to all received input from the
beginnings of sight. We are literally wired to perceive what comes in
according to our knowledge of the space around us.

That's why I think electronic digital imaging would work better than film.
The accumulated data which has known distortions, can be reprocessed to
correspond to the proportions of the image the way we are used to seeing
things. Essentially how the mind interprets the eyes. What I wonder, is
whether there is some inherent optical property of such an arrangement that
would make it's reception inherently more immune to directional placement
distortions than exists with planar systems? We do in fact converge our eyes
on objects we see. We know that flat field cameras must be maintained
parallel to provide undistorted stereo correlation. Perhaps the reason is
this basic geometrical difference.

The concave surface would result in the various incident light angles
behaving differently than on a plane. The angle between incoming rays and a
perpendicular to the sensory surface with planar systems is constantly
increasing in one direction at a somewhat steady rate. That same angle under
some conditions, changes in the opposite direction and at an ever increasing
rate for a concave surface. (a description matching yours above in different
terms) I'm not sure how to relate this to distortion sensitivity in a scene
when the optic sysytem is rotated slightly as opposed to translated. Would
there be less tendency for the rotation to distort the reception? Or is it
again just the mind's familiarity with the process that compensates?

Did you do any movement/image correlations with your ping pong model?

(Can't comment on the other part of the original thread, other than it's
interesting.)

Larry Berlin


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