What is parallax?

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I guess you could flag this as biology and physics both at the same time, but it only let me pick one, so I went with other. I understand that parallax is how the landscape moves in the background, but I’m unable to explain it to someone else.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Your two eyes looking at an object form a triangle. The lines connecting each eye with the object form 2 sides of the triangle, and the angle between them is the parallax angle (twice the parallax angle to be accurate).

The lines extended to infinity define the background each eye sees.

The closer the object to your eyes, the larger the angle, the more distinct the background seen by each eye.

Faraway objects create a small parallax angle, and background is largely same from both eyes.

Over our lifetime, the brain creates empirical relationships between observed parallax and perceived distance, which is how you can guess the distance of a certain object from you by subconsciously backtracking how much parallax you’re observing.

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