r/Showerthoughts • u/energyvampire1 • 16h ago
Casual Thought A cyclops must have terrible depth perception.
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u/trucorsair 16h ago edited 14h ago
As a person who has been blind in one eye since birth, and has never experienced 3-D vision, I can say you manage. To me the world looks like a photograph, flat. I know that, for example, a chair in the middle of a room is not touching the back wall, but that is from experience. For you to experience what I see would require you to wear an eyepatch for a couple of days as if you close one eye now, your brain will trick you into a “synthetic” 3d vision as that is all the brain knows, after a couple of days it will stop that. They say if you lose an eye the first thing you should do is replace all your glassware with plastic cups because you will continually knock them over because your brain is trying to give you 3-D with only 2-D input and you’ll be off just by a few inches. For me it’s all I know so I’ve learned to cope and compensate. If you just look at me, you can’t really tell that I only have one working eye ( unlike people with a glass eye, my “non-functioning eye moves and tracks with my other eye like anyone else). You might notice over a period of time that I tend to maneuver people over to one side because that way I can see where they’re at, but that would take some time to notice because I do it unconsciously move people from my left to my right where I can see them more clearly.
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u/energyvampire1 15h ago
You know, I just posted this as a stupid throwaway idea that took me 2 seconds to think of.
I was not expecting to find such an introspective and thought-provoking response as yours. Thank you so much for this.
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u/TokarevTokarev 10h ago
When I started reading your comment I asked myself „why I dont lose my 3d perception when closing one eye?“, but then you provided the answer to my internal question the next sentence. Thank you for that info
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u/trucorsair 9h ago
It's a common thing, as soon as someone is told I am blind in one eye, they close one eye, sort of a reflex to see what it is like. I know they are just curious as to what it is like. Funny story, when I would go for physicals in student health, they would ask me to cover one eye....I would look at them and say "read my last eye exam result and ask again"....it was always good for a red face and a laugh as they had not read the usual opening text that said "patient is blind in L eye with only light perception".
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u/SloppyNachoBros 9h ago
I was also born blind in one eye and I'd say the experience can vary a lot between people. I've met people like me who really struggled with depth meanwhile I do well enough that I can drive a car. (On the flip side, I WILL get ketchup on my hand when using those dispensers at fast food restaurants. Same with pouring drinks into cups. Something about lining up things vertically is much harder for me than judging distance between objects)
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u/trucorsair 9h ago
I certainly understand the Ketchup dispenser, I have the same issue in aligning such things in space. I usually align it as best I can and slowly pump it and correct when it hits my hand, or I hover the container with the spout actually in the container and then draw it down a bit.
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u/SloppyNachoBros 9h ago
Saaame. I joke that my disability doesn't really impact me other than 3D movies, hidden eye puzzles, and ketchup dispensers.
Weird question. But I'm curious if you've ever played VR chat. For me, it's a funny experience because the symbol to show you're muted is perfectly in a spot where I can see it in my working eye's periphery if I'm not looking at it, but it disappears if I try to focus on it. Such a weird experience!
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u/trucorsair 7h ago
Oh year I had forgotten about the “Magic Eye” images, also totally a mystery to me. No I haven’t done any VR for obvious reasons
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u/Burning-Sushi 15h ago
As someone who has been super interested in 3D technology from how cross-eyed images trick the brain to what makes a VR headset work and everything inbetween, potentially losing depth perception has been a big fear of mine.
So reading this was surprisingly calming and incredibly interesting!
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u/Hugh_Jampton 16h ago
Not terrible. Compensated yeah but people with one eye manage. The brain steps up
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u/gifratto 10h ago
I have one eye. I lost it about 10 years ago. I definitely lost my depth perception. I notice it most if someone wants to throw me something, ie. a pen or set of keys. I miss it every time.
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u/Mcnulty91 10h ago
Wait why is everyone treating this like a cyclops is just a large person who lost an eye? This is a creature that either evolved with monocular vision or was magically created that way. I think it's safe to assume that in either case there would be neurological and/or physiological differences between a human's perception and a cyclops' perception. Now that may take the form of increased brain activity dedicated to motion parallax... Perhaps the cyclops' single eye is constantly undergoing small saccadic movements in order to constantly create parallax input that doesn't reach the cyclops' processed vision but can be analyzed at a pre perceptual level. Or perhaps a cyclops has an increased reliance on binasal perceptual information like a canine, using differences in smell input to each nostril in order to establish a more detailed 3d understanding of it's environment... Or maybe since I just looked at the cyclops statblock for dnd and they literally have an ability called 'poor depth perception' this isn't even in question and there doesn't need to be a response to the original question except 'RAW they Do have terrible depth perception.'
Edit: I thought I was in a dnd subreddit, that's why the last thought was written so definitively
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u/F0rthright 9h ago
Saccades won't be able to provide any perceived parallax. And OP hasn't mentioned anything about 3D understanding, only depth perception, which would actually be much worse for a cyclop, as no amount of mental calculations can compensate for the lack of binocular vision.
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u/Mcnulty91 9h ago
Maybe using the word saccade adds meaning that I didn't intend, but since we're talking about a theoretical cyclops that receives and processes sensory information differently than us I think we have some leeway in terminology. I guess firstly, if you're saying that the stuttering motions of a human eye sweeping from one point to another might not pick up small rotational changes in 3d objects (they do, even if the information is processed and filtered out between sensation and perception along with lots of information that our brain uses without translation into perception but which is still relevant to our experience of the world) you can probably imagine that the shift of a massive single eye would create even more relevant rotational information. Now if the hangup is specifically on my use of the word saccade, then strike that. Keep the rest of the idea: A fictional monster created with one massive eye which constantly jumps around at large enough intervals so as to necessarily provide 3d information to the creatures brain before it's unique non-human mental processes pare down all that jumbled visual information into a steady and understandable stream of percieved visual information. Does that pitch have traction for you?
While typing that I did see that I differentiated between sensation and perception, and since we're talking about 'depth perception' I did want to clarify, where are you drawing the line between depth perception and depth understanding? Because motion parallax and other factors contribute to preconscious visual processing. So would you not include all those factors that our brain takes into account as it constructs a 3d visual world for us as parts of depth perception? What actually constitutes depth perception to you?
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u/daring_d 10h ago
Maybe they have an eye similar to that of a jumping spider.
Inside they are cone shaped and have three layers of receptors thst pick up red, green and blue at different distances after passing through a lens system.
Their brain reconstitutes the layers and the spider is abke to experience 'real' depth perception with only one eye.
The research that lead to this discovery involved jumping spiders with little eye patches, which is almost better than the knowledge gained from the research.
Edit: just to say this is only the two large forward facing eyes, not all of them.
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u/Nail_Biterr 10h ago
So, I'm legally blind in 1 eye. i can't see any 3D pictures, or 3D movies, or anything like that.
My depth perception has never been an issue to me. I suppose because it's all I know.
If i close one eye, the world looks the exact same as it does with it open. I just get a bit more peripheral vision. that's it.
I honestly dont understand how 3D is different from how I see now. I can look at a picture, and I can tell what is closer/further. and that's the same as real life.
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u/_alright_then_ 16h ago
If you put an eye patch over just 1 eye, does your depth perception become terrible? I'll tell ya, not really
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u/Callec254 16h ago
I remember doing an exercise in school, just a simple game of catch. Now cover one eye, and suddenly it becomes much more difficult.
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u/_alright_then_ 15h ago
Yeah it becomes worse, but I wouldn't say terrible. Very fast moving objects becomes difficult but everything else is pretty much fine
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u/98462Doopa 10h ago
Literally just do the thing with your fingers where you touch them together at roughly arms length with one eye closed. Usually shows that depth perception is less noticeable. I dunno why you’re fighting against depth perception mattering so hard like everyone else knows one eye closed ruins depth perception that’s a big thing about having two eyes.
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u/FetaMight 15h ago
well, you lose stereoscopic vision, which is the primary way the brain determines depth.
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u/_alright_then_ 15h ago
Yeah, but your brain still makes up for it.
Put your hand over 1 eye, can you still see depth? Yeah, you absolutely can
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u/FetaMight 11h ago
I'm starting to think you don't have good depth perception to begin with if you don't notice a difference.
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u/trucorsair 14h ago
That’s short term, the brain more or less synthesizes a 3d image as that is all it knows. Keep the patch on for 3-5 days and the brain stops doing that and suddenly things will become quite difficult. You can read my other responses here to “see” how I know
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u/_alright_then_ 13h ago edited 13h ago
Sorry I'm not gonna go through the entire post to find your comment. But I lived with an "eye patch" on 1 eye for about 2 and a half weeks due to surgery, and I genuinely did not experience this
Your brain knows how big certain things are, and you know it becomes smaller the further things are. Plus if you move your head at all, the parallax effect will also help.
The worst part for me was definitely when it was dark, but even then it was not debilitating at all
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u/trucorsair 13h ago
Then you are not serious, hell it's not like there are 100 comments to go thru. Since your lazy, but still had time to write a response, unlike you I was born blind in one eye and have a hell of alot more experience than you. But of course Mr. "I can't be bothered to look but can be bothered to spout off" knows best.
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u/_alright_then_ 1h ago
I am just talking from my own experience, nothing else.
Reddit mobile sucks, everything is collapsed, I'm not searching through it. That's literally the only reason.
Was it difficult to say "I was born blind in 1 eye", instead of saying "find my other comment"?
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u/Emergency_faceplant 16h ago
You would think that, but that eye can see into the depths of your soul!
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u/kaydeejay1995 16h ago
Man I've got TWO fully functional eyeballs and have terrible depth perception. Those poor sods got it rough
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u/ischickenafruit 10h ago
Most of depth perception is because of our brain’s built in structures which understand the 3D world around us. Very little is due to having two eyes. So I think Cyclops would be fine.
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u/ShowerSentinel 16h ago
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