Nick Clemente writes:
I wanted to give you the following tidbiddle for your Ishmates in California. My friend Cassidy and his friend Chris have designed and built a crazy device called a telestereoscope which effectively lets the viewer see things as if their eyes were no longer inside their heads but were in fact several feet apart. According to their website, "The principle behind it is based on human visual perception. In order to make sense of your visual surroundings, part of what your brain must do is estimate how far away things are. One of the ways your brain does this is by using the relative disparity between the images projected onto the retinas of your two eyes. Each object in your field of view will project to a slightly different location on each retina. Essentially, the closer the object, the greater that difference will be. Your brain already knows how far apart your eyes are (about two or three inches), and using that information it can make a good estimate of exactly how far away each object is. This is also the principle behind 3-D movies and stereograms.
Now, if you artificially exaggerate this relative disparity by placing your eyes several feet apart, your brain, still believing that your eyes are only two inches apart, will come to the wrong conclusion about how far away things are. This incorrect information about depth then interacts with everything else you know about what you're seeing (that is a tree, that is a car, etc.) and you begin to draw strange conclusions about the size of things. In short, because it's hard to believe that your head is really ten feet wide, you are forced to conclude that the world around you is really small.
One viewer described it as "like looking at the real world through a Viewmaster."
Cassidy Curtis and Chris Whitney built the device to bring to the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, which took place in the summer of 2000. The Telestereoscope will be part of an outdoor exhibition of art from Burning Man at the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, on the grounds of the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, CA. until 28 July 2001.
For more information, check out their website at www.eyestilts.com.
| Weird Science
