What I Learned Today: eye

Below is NOT mine. I picked it up from a discussion board and I don't want to bother the author with permission, Sooo, here it is, un-attributed, for what it is worth. If you really want to learn about the author, ask me.

He says:

An interesting though odd idea. Motion of course portrays depth of field (stereoscopic vision is essentially all about creating the instantaneous experience of parallax that otherwise would be conveyed by moving a single eye a few inches to the side -- people missing one eye get parallax and depth of field simply by not remaining perfectly static in the world, and 2D video conveys the same thing by having the camera constantly in motion, or the objects in the field constantly moving among themselves).

A similar thing could be achieved with a more gradual motion, but would entail more data -- this stuff appears to be simply the repetitive juxtaposition of a simple binocular pair of images (like from a stereo camera). If instead there were, say, a dozen or more intermediate frames and a more gradual "head wag" (maybe 1.5 seconds each direction) it might be less annoying. But then, it may start to look like video instead of a "photograph".

Solving the problem for people missing one eye could create a more generalized solution for the general public, but it would have to entail creating *real* parallax information so that one's *own* head motions would create the parallax effect.

Holography in fact does exactly this (creates 3D information with the same geometry as the real world), but stereoscopic methods generally don't. (I saw an interesting prototype using very precisely curved mirrors back in the 90s, but it does not create a 3D experience with one eye closed. Somehow the parallax effect was artificially stereoscopic rather than recreating genuine 3D information.)

It ain't gonna happen on today's flat screen display technology without an artificially imposed video-type function.

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