Virtual Reality Stereogram Space

This demonstration has isolated a specific form of visual information that many humans use to perceive relative depth: visual disparity. This phenomenon can easily be explored by holding one thumb up at arm’s length and the other near your face. Fixating on your far thumb involves the involuntary rotation of your eyes to bring their two monocular images into alignment. However, the images of your near thumb will now be out of alignment, resulting in double vision of your near thumb. If you then choose to fixate on your near thumb, it will bring the monocular images of the far thumb out of alignment. This misalignment is what we call disparity. Because the distance between doubled images is proportional to the relative distance of the object from the depth at which you are looking, disparity can be used by the human visual system to perceive the relative distance of objects. Our tool has isolated this cue. For a variety of different causes typically related to the visual or motor impairment of one eye, the development of stereo vision can be disrupted during development. Although our tool has not yet been scientifically validated, we believe that it may be a new method for the rapid assessment of stereoblindness, or the inability to perceive depth from stereo vision. In the case of stereoblindness, our rendering method may also be helpful in the rehabilitation of stereo vision later in life, something which can happen spontaneously, for example, when watching 3D movies. Our tool is useful in that it presents a new way to rehabilitate stereoblindness by encouraging the use of stereo vision in an immersive video game similar to Fruit Ninja or Beat Saber.