Depth Perception and Depth Cues
Hello guys,
It is the end of the weekend today and I must say that it has been a peaceful one for me, recuperating after the week's hard work and getting ready for work for the week coming. I am optimistic about the good that would come our way and I wish we all a great start for the week.
Today I want to discuss with you our perception of depth how we see and understand or perceive depth and how sometimes artists use this knowledge to trick our minds in their work. I do hope you enjoy though and if you are yet to check out my previous work on stereopsis and binocular vision do well to take a look, thank you.
Depth Perception
Have you ever wondered why we as humans see in 3D or 4D as some people would rather put and not 2D? Ever wonder how you can process the fact that a part of the ground looks lower than the other or perhaps why you can interpret that of two objects one if farther than the other or nearer than the other?
Well, this is basically what depth perception is all about though, in simple terms perceiving depth, being able to tell depth. Depth perception is an integral part of our vision processing and ensures that detect, discriminate, and identify objects in space. It helps us in our navigation and appreciation of things around us.
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Depth Perception ensures that we can see in 3 dimensions and this is all possible because of something we refer to as depth cues. These cues are such that the brain interprets them automatically in a specific way or pattern and tends to happen naturally as we grow up. But before we move on to the cues though let me hasten to add that our brain does a lot of the heavy lifting as well as the physiology of the eye which would be treated another time.
Depth Cues
So as I was saying these are cues that our brain naturally picks up from the environment and interprets them in a specific way to mean specific things. And the fun part of this whole thing with depth cues is the fact that none of them is deliberate in any way. We do not think of them, it is never something we do consciously and even when we try to be conscious about it the brain doesn't allow much. The brain is quite the powerful organ though.
So what are these cues? They include height, position, linear, texture, size, and light and shadow just to mention a few. So let's see how we can understand these see how it relates to we perceiving or understanding what depth is.
- Height
Naturally, when objects are closer to us they tend to appear taller in comparison to when objects are farther away from us. And so standing afar and looking at say two people walking down a path, your brain may automatically interpret the one looking shorter to be farther away from the one closest to you.
- Position
Your brain also interprets objects whose body parts may not be fully showing or be blocked by another to be farther away from us. And so when there is a boy and a table afar and you can see perhaps the whole table and part of the boy it naturally tells you that the boy is behind the table and Vis Versa.
- Linear
The brain also sees diminishing lines to be far away. Artists use this a lot in their drawing and this is especially seen best when one uses the high road or the rail tracks. As it goes it seems to be coming together and diminishing and disappearing however you realize that if you follow it that's not happening. And so any view that comes like that the brain interprets it as been far.
- Texture
Our brain also interprets things that are smoother in our visual fields to be farther away whereas those that are closer to be rougher. Because naturally when things are closer we now tend to see the blemishes that are available and vice versa. And so the smoother an object appears to you in comparison with another the farther away it may be seen to be.
- Size
The last thing we are going to look at is size. It is just like the writings you find in the driving mirror, "objects in the mirror are closer than what they appear to be**. Or I didn't get it right? Anyway, that's just, by the way, things that appear bigger compared to their surroundings and other objects in your visual space may be interpreted to be closer as compared to others.
Conclusion
And so these are some of the ways that our brain sees objects in space and interprets them automatically for us without even having to wonder about them or make any form of conscious efforts. If you are curious about it you may take another look at them yourself or try them out as you walk about and see if it is true.
I would be awaiting your feedback on this as to whether you feel these are true and you can relate or not. Science is an interesting field to delve into and I love to keep us all engaged. So yeah, thanks for reading and I do hope as usual that you got a thing or two from this.
Reference
Sun, H. C., Di Luca, M., Ban, H., Muryy, A., Fleming, R. W., & Welchman, A. E. (2016). Differential processing of binocular and monocular gloss cues in human visual cortex. Journal of neurophysiology, 115(6), 2779–2790. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00829.2015
Thompson, L., Ji, M., Rokers, B., & Rosenberg, A. (2019). Contributions of binocular and monocular cues to motion-in-depth perception. Journal of vision, 19(3), 2. https://doi.org/10.1167/19.3.2
Royden, C. S., Parsons, D., & Travatello, J. (2016). The effect of monocular depth cues on the detection of moving objects by moving observers. Vision research, 124, 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2016.05.002
Buckthought, A., Yoonessi, A., & Baker, C. L., Jr (2017). Dynamic perspective cues enhance depth perception from motion parallax. Journal of vision, 17(1), 10. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.1.10
Hola querida y gracias por leer por tus comentarios. Sí, de hecho es cierto y nuestra capacidad de poder interpretar todo esto desde nuestros entornos es fundamental para nuestra visión.
Saludos querida y todo lo mejor!
Wonderful posts and nice pictures to complement them
🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Thank you bro
You are welcome
I have seen this being used mostly in the drawing of mountains, the mountains that an artist wants to be seen farthest will be made smooth and lighter, and the mountain that is closer will be made rougher and darker in colour and contrast.
This is because a convex mirror is used in vehicle mirrors, and the property of a convex mirror is to show a wide field view of the objects, and also it makes them look larger.
All in all good presentation. This would become the best post for me, if you could explain how the convex lens in our eyes works.
Haha, thanks so much for the feedback I must say I’m glad to see that my post actually got a read and a positive feedback.
In answering your question, the lens in the eye has a property that we call accommodation which I would properly treat again in another post for your benefit.
This property enable it to assume both convex and concave shapes in terms of the properties of these lenses thus enabling it to switch to making near objects clearer when need be and far objects clearer too where need be.
It is an interesting phenomenon that you would enjoy reading and learning about I’m sure, I dunno if you get my point though however you can ask for further clarification.
PS: ‘Obiects in the mirror has no direct relation to the eye though and was added to bring humor and fun to my writing’.
Thanks once again, cheers!
This will happen mostly if people start focusing on the quality of content rather than the economical benefit. There are people who post random and copied comments over and over again, but do not add any value to the post.
I read in my school textbooks that we cannot read if the text is nearer than 25 centimeters, but for me this value is less.
Indeed, I am keen on getting quality out there rather than quantity which is why if I am not ready to write and write well I do not post.
There is something called the Near Point of Accommodation, you may want to check this out, this varies according to person and is probably one of the reasons why your near point may not be up to 25 centimeters. Also, let me add that as we grow our accommodation power reduces taking our close point from 25 centimeters even further than that. If you are 40 years and above you will probably fall within this group otherwise known as presbyopia. I would also treat this topic as the days go by.