T3D Re: acuity enhanced with binocular vision

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

>Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 11:47:01 -0700
>From: Jim Crowell <crowell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: T3D Re: acuity enhanced with binocular vision

>At 7:54 AM -0800 3/19/98, john bercovitz wrote:
>>So what's the mechanism of enhancement?  Was there any
>>speculation?  My guess would be that the two images are
>>being compared and anomalous disparities between eyes
>>are being removed in processing.

>John, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "anomolous disparities".  Since
>these are acuity tests, the displays would've all been flat.

>The most obvious reason for improvement would be the simple increase in the
>number of samples (photons or neural impulses).  There's noise associated
>with both images (photon noise & neural noise); the photon noise is
>independent in the two eyes & the neural noise would be at least to some
>extent, so you'd get some improvement just from doubling the number of
>relevant photons.  

Would you expect comparable improvement by doubling the number of photons
to one eye, while continuing to deprive the other eye of the image?
I can tell by looking out the window that I can see details better with
both eyes than with either eye alone, in bright sunlight. I'm not convinced
that doubling the brightness of sunlight would result in all that much
improvement in visibility of details.

John R


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