Exhibit A: nearly every single person I work with.
- purplehorseshoe, who just drives herself to corporate functions now.
Hi, I’m digs, and I’m a monocularist…
No depth perception since birth (well, since at least first grade, when my parents took me to a specialist), but no complaints. Those monocular cues make it easy enough that I drive, parallel park (like a boss!), play soccer, etc. without a single thought about it in the last few years.
The only thing I can’t do is play racquetball – if a ball’s speeding at you, there isn’t enough time to “figure out” where it is in space… before it hits you in the nose.
Huh. This is a really quite fascinating thread. I’m… I don’t want to say I have faceblindness, but I’m not so good with the faces, ok?
So far as stereo vision goes, I failed the depth perception test when I was trying to go into officer training school in the Air Force–and as I was perfectly ready to go in for helicopter rescue, as near as the AF gets to special forces, the guys at the MEPS station really, really wanted me to succeed at that test. (As it happens, it didn’t matter: I admitted to having GERD. Different story.) But I don’t have any problem with 3D movie and the like.
I’m a bit surprised by all the folks having trouble with parallel parking, though. IME, parallel parking has much less to do with depth perception than with knowing, as a purely mechanical matter, when to cut the wheels. And that’s all about when you pass a certain point on the already-parked car next to you. Once you’ve got that, it’s totally paint-by-numbers.
[QUOTE=LawMonkey]
I’m a bit surprised by all the folks having trouble with parallel parking, though. IME, parallel parking has much less to do with depth perception than with knowing, as a purely mechanical matter, when to cut the wheels. And that’s all about when you pass a certain point on the already-parked car next to you. Once you’ve got that, it’s totally paint-by-numbers.
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So you cut the wheel, and then when do you stop moving? And before I even start backing up, how do I know if my car will fit between two other cars? All I can do is try, and go slowly so I don’t slam into the other cars.
Reminds me of the fellow Scoutmaster at a Boy Scout camp a few years back. He had cancer of the eye (?) and had only one good eye left. Walking along a dark trail at night, he’d comment on all the shooting stars that night. They were fireflies.
On the other hand, he won the rifle shooting contest…
Ha! I have amblyopia and I beat just about all my friends when we went clay-pigeon shooting for my birthday - and despite the fact I have to sight using the “wrong eye” (I’m right-handed but have to sight using my good eye, which is the left one.)
I don’t think questions like the OP’s “when you do this do you see the 3d nature of reality* or does it all still seem 2d?” make sense to people like us, because, well, the world is clearly 3D, but it doesn’t magically go flat when we close one eye. Just like pictures on a standard TV screen don’t look flat, because you get depth cues from the moving picture elements, or movement of the camera.
I can’t usually see Magic Eye pictures, although after hours of eye-watering effort I did finally manage to make a couple of them “pop” a few years ago. It was cool, but I’ve never been able to replicate it. I also saw a 3D movie at a theme park years ago that suddenly popped into 3D, which was kind of freaky, as it was more three-dimensional than the real world. The effect didn’t last, though.
But unlike some people here, I’ve never had problems parallel parking, or catching a ball, or playing squash or whatever. I wouldn’t say I’m brilliant at ball sports, but I’m no more or less inept than my stereoscopically gifted friends! When I park, I can’t gauge the distance between the end of the car and the end of the space just by eyeballing it - I have to move my head slightly to get the depth cue, but it becomes second nature. I pride myself on being able to squeeze into tight spaces.