Vision and Art with Two Eyes (eBook)

This book celebrates binocular vision by presenting illustrations that require two eyes to see the effects of cooperation and competition between them. Pictures are flat but by printing them in different colours and viewing them through similarly coloured filters (included with the book) they are brought to life either in stereoscopic depth or in rivalry with one another. They are called anaglyphs and all those in the book display the ways in which the eyes interact. Thus, the reader is an integral element in the book and not all readers will see the same things. The history, science and art of binocular vision can be experienced in ways that are not usually available to us and with images made specifically for this book. The study of vision with two eyes was transformed by the invention of stereoscopes in the early 19^th century. Anaglyphs are simple forms of stereoscopes that have three possible outcomes from viewing them - with each eye alone to see the monocular images, with both eyes to see them in stereoscopic depth or rivalry, or without the red/cyan glasses where they can have an appeal independent of the binocularity they encompass. Through the binocular pictures and the words that accompany them there will be an appreciation of just how remarkable the processes are that yield binocular singleness and depth. Moreover, the opportunities for expressing these processes are explored with many examples of truly binocular art.

Nicholas J. Wade is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee in Scotland. He received his degree in psychology from the University of Edinburgh and his Ph.D. from Monash University, Australia, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, at Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioural Physiology, Germany.  His research is concerned with the representation of space and motion in human vision, the history of vision research, binocular and motion perception, and the interplay between visual science and art. He has carried out psychophysical research on many visual phenomena and has written extensively on the history of the vision and perception. Nick Wade is the author of more than 20 successful books as well as multitudinous influential papers in the field. He is a long time consulting editor of the journal 'Perception' and Section editor on Sensory and Behavioral Sciences of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.