Snowglobe World - using VR to explore depth perception

When viewed through the VR headset with one eye, the virtual environment looks like random electronic snow - dots dancing on a flat colored background. However, when viewed with two eyes, shapes begin to emerge. Using the tricks known to vision science, we have isolated just one of the many cues to visual depth that the visual system takes advantage of in the natural world: visual disparity. We rarely see evidence that the human visual system senses the world through two eyes independently. Instead, our subjective experience is of one binocular worldview that is a fusion of the two monocular images projected on the retinas. Overlaying the two eyes' monocular images upon one another would reveal that different objects are horizontally offset proportionally to their distance from the head - a feature we refer to as disparity.