eli5: How does depth perception work?

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I don’t naturally have it so visual explains don’t make sense to me

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You do have depth perception, or you wouldn’t be able to do anything. You wouldn’t be able to even walk around in the world, because you would have literally no idea how far away from you anything was.

What you may lack, and what a substantial minority of the population lacks or is impaired in (I think about 5-10%), is stereovision, which relies on the combination of the images from your two eyes. The most common cause of this is when one eye is highly dominant over the other, or one eye has impaired vision.

The main binocular depth cue is binocular parallax (AKA binocular disparity or stereopsis), which others in this thread have explained. You are lacking access to this particular source of depth information. However, there are many others, including motion parallax, perspective, relative size, and occlusion, which don’t depend on having two functioning eyes working together. These *monocular* depth cues allow you to function mostly normally.

You (likely) mostly notice that you don’t have good stereovision when doing things that require precise depth perception, and/or when monocular cues are missing or not precise enough. For instance, catching a ball or threading a needle. And of course, you also notice when going to watch a “3D movie” (i.e. a movie presented as two images to your separate eyes, with binocular parallax), or when trying to see the 3D image hidden in one of those “magic eye” pictures. But it’s a common misconception that that’s all that depth perception is, and you (and others) are living proof of that, since you aren’t confined to your bed and being fed through a tube.

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