Editing 941: Depth Perception
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
| Latest revision | Your text | ||
| Line 8: | Line 8: | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
| β | This comic is one of those that is less focused on | + | This comic is one of those that is less focused on humour and more focused on a sense of wonder at the world for both [[Cueball]]/[[Randall]] and the reader. |
Cueball discusses how difficult it is to intuitively feel the reality of how vast the things he sees every day and night are - how big the clouds are, and how far away the stars are. {{w|Depth perception}} - seeing things in 3-D rather than as a flat 2-D image - is partly created by having "binocular vision", or two eyes spaced apart. Each eye sees a slightly different angle on a scene, and the brain combines these two views to give a genuinely three-dimensional view of something. 3-D glasses work the same way, by feeding a slightly offset image into each eye. When you look at far away objects, the offset from each eye is undetectable, and so they may look more like flat 2-D images - hence the impression Cueball has of stars being painted onto a dome rather than being extremely large, far away objects at very different distances. | Cueball discusses how difficult it is to intuitively feel the reality of how vast the things he sees every day and night are - how big the clouds are, and how far away the stars are. {{w|Depth perception}} - seeing things in 3-D rather than as a flat 2-D image - is partly created by having "binocular vision", or two eyes spaced apart. Each eye sees a slightly different angle on a scene, and the brain combines these two views to give a genuinely three-dimensional view of something. 3-D glasses work the same way, by feeding a slightly offset image into each eye. When you look at far away objects, the offset from each eye is undetectable, and so they may look more like flat 2-D images - hence the impression Cueball has of stars being painted onto a dome rather than being extremely large, far away objects at very different distances. | ||
| β | He wonders if he can work around this impression as far as the clouds are concerned. Normally, Cueball's eyes are a few | + | He wonders if he can work around this impression as far as the clouds are concerned. Normally, Cueball's eyes are a few centimetres apart, like everyone else's, and his 3-D perspective is based on that scale. Here, Cueball puts HD webcams on the tops of football uprights, which are 360 feet (~110 m) apart instead of a few centimetres. He uses strong reading glasses to hold up a smartphone, and feeds the far more offset images of the webcam feeds to each eye so that his brain will create a 3-D perspective of the clouds, which would normally be too massive for the offset between two human eyes to grasp their three-dimensional structure in the same way as smaller, closer things. |
This technique doesn't give him the view as if he were a giant as in the final panel, but rather as if he were a giant "at the bottom of an abyss" as per the second-last panel, as the clouds are higher than the goalposts on which the cameras are mounted. The final panel is some artistic license to give the reader a real sense of what it feels like for Cueball to carry this out; it shows us that he has finally achieved a more truthful perspective on the size and shapes of the clouds than he had when he started. | This technique doesn't give him the view as if he were a giant as in the final panel, but rather as if he were a giant "at the bottom of an abyss" as per the second-last panel, as the clouds are higher than the goalposts on which the cameras are mounted. The final panel is some artistic license to give the reader a real sense of what it feels like for Cueball to carry this out; it shows us that he has finally achieved a more truthful perspective on the size and shapes of the clouds than he had when he started. | ||
| Line 18: | Line 18: | ||
The reason for the reversal of the "right camera" and "left camera" panes on the smartphone screen is unclear, this is likely just a mistake. | The reason for the reversal of the "right camera" and "left camera" panes on the smartphone screen is unclear, this is likely just a mistake. | ||
| β | The title text is a line from the 1969 song "{{w|Both Sides Now}}" by Joni Mitchell; the full chorus runs: "I've looked at clouds from both sides now / From up and down and still somehow / It's cloud illusions I recall / I really don't know clouds at all." Binocular depth perception involves seeing the same object from slightly different angles, from 'both sides', so Randall is taking the song lyric and | + | The title text is a line from the 1969 song "{{w|Both Sides Now}}" by Joni Mitchell; the full chorus runs: "I've looked at clouds from both sides now / From up and down and still somehow / It's cloud illusions I recall / I really don't know clouds at all." Binocular depth perception involves seeing the same object from slightly different angles, from 'both sides', so Randall is taking the song lyric and literalising it. The song itself has a bittersweet tone and relates to how you understand things differently as you mature, but still don't necessarily feel like you understand them at all, so the tone also fits pretty un-ironically into the theme of the comic. |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
