Thursday, September 18, 2008

New Problem: Depth Perception

No matter how good your cameraman, or the equipment he's using, it's impossible to create the illusion of depth on a television. You might be able to tell some things are further away than others, but they won't ever look truly 3-D the way the real world does when you have two eyes open.

On the other hand, a mirror can give you a perfect illusion of depth (I am not using "perfect" in a technical sense here). A mirror image world is just as depth-rich to your binocular vision as the genuine article.

So why is that? Why can't a television gives depth perception? And what can a mirror do that a television can't?

1 comment:

Nik said...

This is a shot in the dark. But it's the first thing that came to mind..
A mirror creates a virtual image of an object behind itself. the distance (virtual distance of course) between the virtual image and the mirror offers depth perception as the human eye uses that image as the object to create a real image on the retina.
A TV on the other hand simply creates an image on the screen. The manner of creating the image depends on the kind of TV but the point is that all images (regardless of their actual distances wrt each other) are displayed on the same plane. Therefore, no depth perception.