Imagine your take a photo while standing on a train track pointing your camera in either direction of the perfectly even track. Now if you look at the photo. You would figure, that both individual metal parts of the track move closer together the farther they are away, creating some kind of “depth”(?). But I cant explain why that is.
It found it very odd to look at such a pictures in the last time, and started to question it. Why is our visual perception that kind of “distorted”?
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The way we see things has to do with triangle math, so this is going to be a trigonometry-related eli5, but I’ll do my best to make it palatable.
When I look at two objects, say two rails, the ‘distance’ between them is actually the *angle* between them from my perspective. Imagine I T-posed – the angle between my hands would be as big as it could possible get. But if you’re standing in front of me, facing me, the angle won’t appear as big, and as you back away the angle gets smaller and smaller and approaches zero.
This is what happens as you look further and further down the tracks. The angle between them approaches zero.
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