I have a window in my current living space that’s a simple, single-hung window, and on the outside is fitted with a fine mesh window screen to minimize bugs coming in. Inside, I have a perfectly clear view of the outdoors – I can see the front yard, the road, my neighbor’s house, with no significant or even noticeable obstruction from the screen. Yet, on the outside, you can barely see in through the window at all – even with sunlight streaming in and illuminating the room, you can only see basically what’s right against the window, nothing beyond that. Though I’m sure this is a fully intentional privacy feature, I’m terribly curious about how that can be, that one way the screen provides next to no obstruction, yet the other it’s almost completely obstructing the view. From what I understand about vision, we see based off light particles bouncing off the subject into our eyes, so… is the outside of the screen somehow absorbing light particles? It isn’t even especially dark, just a sort of medium grey fine metal mesh…
Thanks in advance!
In: 5
When hitting a window, some light will pass through, and some will bounce off. When you stand inside a room looking out, you’re seeing light that passes through from the outside and light that bounces off from the inside. There’s much more light outside than in, so the image that gets reflected in the window gets drowned out by the image passing through the window. On the other hand, someone outside would see light reflecting from the outside and light passing through from inside. Again, there’s much more light outside, so the reflection would drown out the image inside the room.
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