I have to confess that I greet the news of a possible expansion of 3-d experiences in cinemas with a bit of chagrine. The reason is -- deep personal confession here -- that like about 10% of the population, I'm stereoblind. This isn't the same thing at all as not having vision in one eye. Both eyes work, but they don't work well together. Like Rembrandt, I can't fuse images from the two eyes together to get that pop-out of the third dimension. I'll never "get" a Magic Eye picture. I'll never really be able to enjoy these 3-d movies and in fact having to wear those glasses may even detract from my experiences.
What's interesting about this, though, is that I had no idea of my deficit until I had some vision testing at the age of 18 as part of an interview for a summer job at a glass factory (!!). The company nurse, fearing that I wouldn't be able to detect huge slabs of sharp-edged window panes coming at me, wouldn't recommend me for a job. When I tell people that I'm stereoblind, they often ask me why I don't bump into things or how I cope with a world that must look just like a picture. But the truth is that we have lots of other sources of 3d information, especially different kinds of visual motion, so that I don't at all feel as though I'm trapped in Flatland (though I can have no idea of how the world might look different to me if I did have stereovision).
I have to tell you, though, that for a guy who works in a lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment designed to generate painstakingly realistic stereoscopic simulations of the world, there are days when I have to laugh a little at my own predicament. Perhaps it even has something to do with my own penchant for getting lost. But if so, the prevalence of stereoblindness must be much higher than we think because most of us spend some part of every day not really knowing where we are.
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