I wandered across a website (actually for kids, I believe) about 3D/binocular vision (here that puts forth the claim that only 5% of the population doesn’t have proper binocular vision.
I’m definitely one of those people: childhood was a long and unpleasant journey of appointments with ophthalmologists, eye drops, eye patches, and surgery (twice) to try to fix the problem. Obviously, it did not fix the problem, and I was always the kid in the elementary school classroom who couldn’t see the hidden picture in the Magic Eye poster*. It took me until sometime in my teen years to realize that most people need to close one eye to shift the ‘angle’ they’re viewing an object at; I can pretty much tune out one eye with the other still open. One of the apparently few with this wonderful, wonderful gift*.
Now having seen that number, though, I’m feeling a bit lonely. Any other binocularly-impaired Dopers? And, perhaps of greater interest: anyone who was but has improved with what apparently is called “Vision therapy”?
*No, that’s not sarcasm. I’m not bitter at all. No bitterness to be found over having nothing to show for the thousands of dollars and hours spent, the stress my parents went through, and the fairly intense amounts of emotional and physical pain I went through as a kid. And don’t get me started about how badly I wanted to be a decent softball player, despite the fact that it’s a sport that requires, you know, depth perception.
I can see the Magic Eye pictures. When looking through binoculars,I can see depth.
In real life I cannot judge a flyball or popup in baseball, follow a pass in football or accurately judge the distance for a shot in basketball. I will not parallel park or try to squeeze into a tight parking space, I can’t judge the distance. I do not see depth. I did have some form of “visual therapy”, don’t even remember what was done.
I’m legally blind (something like 20-400, with astigmatism) in my left eye; I have 20-40 vision (without astigmatism) in my right eye. It is very difficult to focus both my eyes on the same thing; in low light I have virtually no sense of depth.
Apparently I have non-wandering lazy eye which was not diagnosed until I was a late teen when an eye doctor observed that I read with my right eye closed. As I understand it, it’s too late now and LASIK wouldn’t fix it because my left eye “just gave up seeing.” I
I’ve got amblyopia (lazy eye) in my right eye. It’s never really limited me much- as a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I was 25 or so when my eye doctor took one look at my eye and said, “I bet you can’t play basketball”. He was right- I absolutely suck at free throws. I thought it was just that I, well, suck at basketball, but he said it was because I have zero depth perception.
That’s the only way it’s ever really bothered me, though.
I have both an astigmatism and herpes simplex scars in my left eye.* The scars are pretty much dead center over the center of the lens of course.**
I have learned to compensate. I can catch a ball, parallel park, judge distances and do all of that stuff.
Oddly enough my peripheral is perfect. The astigmatism and scaring are over the center of the eye, not the edge.
*Thank the FSM that both of those things happened to the same eye, or I would be fucked.
** Herpes in the eye comes from looking for love in all the wrong places.
I’ve got amblyopia. Didn’t have surgery, but did have years of patches and vision therapy. Did it improve? Sort of. I ended up with better vision in my left eye than I started with, but not enough to be really useful and therefore I still don’t have binocular vision.
I’ve got 20-20 vision but I can’t catch a ball to save my life, or see a magic eye thing or whatever you call them. Also, my left eye has less range than my right eye, and for the longest time, I couldn’t close my right eye independently - don’t know if that’s related. It was determined early in elementary school that ‘my eyes don’t coordinate’ and that I can’t see depth, just like my mom. No official name was ever attached to it that I’m aware of. Nothing was ever done about it, though, and it doesn’t cause me any real problems in daily life.
ETA: Rick, you might have made that joke a trillion times but you just made my day. Or at least the upcoming hour
Signing in. My left eye is very dominant. I had surgery and wore eye patches for a while as a kid - or at least I should have done but I was always taking them off cos they were so dorky.
But it really doesn’t affect me much. I can play squash to a reasonable standard. I can catch a ball. I used to play in goal for a university football (soccer) team, even though the ophthalmologists tell me I have very poor depth perception.
I could never see Magic Eye pictures until a couple of years ago when I found a website with lots of examples. I spent ages squinting at the screen until my eyes watered, and half-closed my “good” eye, and eventually I managed to see a couple of them. I can still only ever see a tiny fraction of them though.
I went clay-pigeon shooting for the first time last weekend. It was a bit awkward that I’m right-handed and left-eye-dominant, so I had to close my good eye and sight with the bad one, but I still did pretty well (better than most of my friends!). I used to do a bit of air-rifle shooting, and with a small rifle you can lean across and sight with the other eye - not possible with a shotgun.
Something I’m curious about - people with proper binocular vision, do you see equally with both eyes or is one always slightly dominant? If you look down at your nose, which side of it do you see? Or do you see both at the same time somehow? I always see the left side of it, and if I focus “through” the ghost image of my nose, objects behind it (which are only in view of my right eye) are less clear.
My father doesn’t. It prevented him (probably fortunately) becoming a fighter pilot in WW II. He joined the navy instead. Then the police came around to arrest him for not turning up for his army enlistment.
I have fine binocular vision…up to a range of about three feet. (And I don’t think of it as “Astigmatism” so much as “built in anti-aliasing”)
Didn’t really realize how bad it was until I wore my reading glasses outside after leaving a classroom one night…on an open, third floor walkway, at night, with plenty of lit houses in the hills in the distance.
Whoa.
One plus side effect, at least…without glasses, looking down from heights doesn’t bother me, and vice versa (Also something I didn’t realize until I tried it).
My mom isn’t too good at it. Probably from the amblyopia and the surgery.
It will be interesting to see how my younger kid turns out. Her left eye doesn’t go left; she has Duane’s Syndrome, which means that the nerves on that side never developed. Lazy eye can be improved, but not this. Her eyes track well otherwise–she just has a tendency to turn her head to look left and it looks really wierd when she doesn’t. She gets double vision when her eyes don’t match up, but I don’t really know how her depth perception is–she’s too young to really tell me.
I have binocular vision but only to a point. I’ve never been good at the Magic Eye. OTOH I can make old stereoscope pictures work without the lens thingy.
My optometrist is actually suggesting monovision (undercorrecting the non-dominant eye) to make close-up clearer, instead of with reading glasses. It feels OK but the whole idea seems weird.
What Rick said, with the possible exception of the second footnote. I think he’s making a funny; but my herpes showed up when I was eight, long before I started looking for love anywhere.
Pretty much the same story here, except that both of my eyes are astigmatic and that my left eye is somewhat stronger than Hello’s.
I’ve never considered my depth perception particularly bad, though … but I suspect I have just naturally and unconsciously adopted loads of coping methods. At least for the purposes of sports and driving, I do just fine. However, I can’t see a thing in Magic Eye posters. And I do sometimes walk into things thinking “how the heck did I not clear that? I had a lot of room there?!?”
no astigmatism here, but I’m 20/450 in my left eye and 20/40 in my right. I can see fine without glasses, but have no depth perception.
The cool thing is that when I order contacts, I get a double supply - my optometrist said not to worry about the right eye, and since insurance gets me x pairs a year, he gives me twice the amount of contacts for the left eye.
I have a mild astigmatism in my right eye and it will wander slightly. I, in the past couple years, have started to train it more. I really don’t want my brain giving up on it, so I give it workouts. I read some threads with it, I wear my eyepatch during my workouts, those kinds of things. I can’t see 3-D movies or Magic Eye posters, but it’s getting easier to focus through my right eye when I want to and I’m noticing that they’re beginning to work together better these days. I notice I see out the passenger side mirror easier, without turning my head any, and when I close my left eye the world no longer “jumps” like it used to. Oddly enough my right eye has much better color perception. A car will look grey to me with my primary, left eye, vision and when I focus through my right eye I can see champagne or silver where I thought it was grey. Colors are sharper and brighter when I use my right. If you’re a video gamer, turn up the gamma on your favorite game a couple notches. That’s what my left eye sees, my right sees the colors at normal settings. It’s pretty weird.
According to the eye doctor, people with monovision get a lot of information from shadows, and this is enough to compensate for most everyday tasks. The human brain is very adaptive.
It most circumstances, my depth perception does not appear to be particularly bad. “Flat” shadowless lighting conditions bring out the weakness in my vision and cause me to walk into things.
There’s loads of visual cues about depth that aren’t dependent on binocular vision - motion parallax, perspective, color, occlusion, etc. Obviously, it’s more than enough for people to function in the world, but when it comes to the more touchy things, two eyes are better than one. I’m sure I’m not the only person in this thread who begins preemptively swearing when I need to thread a needle.
I don’t. I had one eye that was so much worse when I was a kid (well, both were bad, but one was REALLY bad) that I never learned to see with both at one time. I’ve since had LASIK and my “bad eye” switched places, so now I mostly see through the other one.
It bothers me not at all - I’m a pretty good trap shooter, actually, and my problems in golf have nothing to do with my eyes. The only real drawback in daily life is that I can’t see those Magic Eye pictures. No problem threading needles, but I’ve been doing that since I was a little girl. My brain has just learned to compensate for everything and doesn’t feel the need to draw my attention to stuff.
ETA - My right eye does sometimes wander off on its own. I’m really sensitive about it. My boyfriend tries not to make fun of it, but he can’t help it sometimes. “How do you not know it’s doing that?!”
← 