If you look at uneven snow (heaps thrown aside when clearing pathways is good, but a partially-melted smooth snow surface works too) through a vertical-horizontal grid, such as the fine wire one-centimetre mesh embedded in reinforced glass windows and doors, you may see the lumps and bumps as tilted blocks or pyramids.
If you look with one eye covered at a photograph with vivid colours and strong depth cues you may see it in 3D. The effect is quite unmistakable and was a complete surprise to me when I first noticed it. I was drinking coffee while reading New Scientist, and the raised mug got between the sightline of one eye and a picture on the page, and the picture suddenly sprang into a 3D image. I almost spilled the coffee.
These two effects may be well-known but I've never heard of them.
The one-eyed-3D-color-image phenomenon is a result of a key bit of color perception: "warm colors advance while cool colors recede."
ReplyDeletehttp://aithene.creativeindependence.net/2010/02/28/color-theory-hots-advance-cools-recede/
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/scolor-e.html
Without the information from stereo vision to interfere, your one-eyed perception allows this effect to be the primary driver of what you perceive.
Completely off topic, but do you have any thoughts on Bruce Sterling's Caryatids? I haven't read it, but the description here of a "radically altered near-future Earth in which all human governments except China's have been wiped out by environmental changes" and society is divided into two rival groups, "science-savvy green capitalists bent on deploying the latest and greatest in innovation to save (or revive) the planet" and "technology-obsessed liberal anarchists whose societies revolve around machine-mediated communities" made it sound like it might be down your alley.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure it was coffee? :)
ReplyDeleteJames - yes, it was coffee. Other drinks produce quite different stereoscopic effects.
ReplyDeleteJonathan, I think that's part of it, but I still get the effect when looking at pictures where cool colours are nearer the front.
I thought it was due to the brain imposing what it decides should be 3D objects from their shape.
ReplyDeleteI have been waiting for years for a film company to realise this and release a new film in the lowest tech 3D format - glasses with one lens black.
This might not (and probably doesn't) have anything to do with it, but developing cataracts have an early effect on color-perception (red-yellow vs. blue-green). Unfortunately, I didn't try any 3D techniques during that phase, and now all I can say is that the replacement plastic lenses make all colors amazingly more brilliant and there's no perceptible difference between the right and left eye.
ReplyDeleteThis might not (and probably doesn't) have anything to do with it, but developing cataracts have an early effect on color-perception (red-yellow vs. blue-green). Unfortunately, I didn't try any 3D techniques during that phase, and now all I can say is that the replacement plastic lenses make all colors amazingly more brilliant and there's no perceptible difference between the right and left eye.
ReplyDeleteCompletely unrelated to this thread, really sorry.... but what do you think are the best SF books from the past year?
ReplyDeleteAndySmith
I wouldn't know, because (like most writers, I suspect) I haven't read enough of them. There's a lot of discussion of this and related matters over at Torque Control and other blogs listed under 'Skiffy' in my sidebar.
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