SV: Capacity of the brain

Joseph H Allen jhallen at
Fri Sep 24 21:48:09 EST 1999

In article <37EAAEF7.70952521 at>,
Bernd Paysan  <bernd.paysan at> wrote:
>3D vision is pretty hard. A significant number of people don't have it,
>even though both their eyes are good. And even the 3D-vision capable
>people use a lot of hints (like shades) to deduce the depths of an
>object. That's why shades and flat projection like on TV actually work -
>we generate the third dimension from our experience, and are fine even
>though the picture is flat.

If you cover one eye, the binocular hints are eliminated and shading hints
are relied upon even more- which gives flat images like paintings an
improved impression of depth.  Try it some time.  The effect is especially
apparent on good renaissance paintings.  Sometimes you find ones with
incorrect shading hints which just look wrong with one eye.

Then there's Chinese flat perspective paintings.... someday I'm going to
build a Chinese painting camera.  I envision some kind of autofocus
telescope with a single pixel imaging device mounted to a big X/Y table. 
You scan the "image" by moving the telescope (but the telescope is always
perpendicular to the table).  Everything depicted in the resulting image is
"actual size" and the viewer is not forced to accept the single
European/fascist point of view decided upon by the artist :-)
/*  jhallen at ( */               /* Joseph H. Allen */
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]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c\n"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}

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