3d flattening (was Re: Uploading, that's needed !! -Reply -Reply )

Michael Butler (mmb@best.com)
Wed, 26 Nov 1997 16:17:11 -0800 (PST)


On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Brent Allsop wrote:
> Why do you think mountains on the horizon several miles away,
> the moon many hundreds of thousands of miles behind them, the sun many
> millions of miles behind it, and the stars many light-years behind it,
> all look like they are the same distance? It is because there is only
> so much room in your visual cortex and these objects are all
> represented at the edge of this representational space in your mind.

Umm, Brent, on this particular matter I think you may be off the beam a
bit. I think they all look like they're at the same distance because
there's only so much distance between my eyeballs. I am of the opinion
that if I could provide myself with a long enough interpupillary distance,
I could indeed tell the diference.

I think there may well be representational/modeling nonlinearities, I
*know* there are perceptual and mediation nonlinearities (for a simple
example, a fixed frequency tone source changes pitch depending on how loud
it is)... I just think this particulat one may be a somewhat bogus
example.

MMB