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`Foundations of the
`
`STEREOSCOPIC
`
`CINEMA
`
`A Study in Depth
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`Please make note of this special copyright notice for this
`electronic edition of “Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema”
`downloaded from the virtual library of the Stereoscopic Displays and
`Applications conference website (www.stereoscopic.org):
`
`Copyright 1982 Lenny Lipton. All rights reserved.
`This copy of the book is made available with the permission of the
`author for non-commercial purposes only. Users are granted a
`limited one-time license to download one copy solely for their own
`personal use.
`
`This edition of “Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema” was converted to electronic
`format by Andrew Woods, Curtin University of Technology.
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`
`Contents
`
`Preface
`
`8
`
`Acknowledgments
`
`15
`
`A Technical History of Stereocinema
`
`16
`
`Stereopsis and Stereoscopy
`
`53
`
`The Stereoscopic Field
`
`91
`
`Transmission Systems: Classical Developments
`
`119
`
`Transmission Systems: Modern Developments
`
`149
`
`Binocular Symmetries
`
`177
`
`Binocular Asymmetries: Depth-Range Relationships
`
`190
`
`Binocular Asymmetries: Photographic Variables
`
`221
`
`OO\l®U‘l-bUUl\J
`
`Afterword
`
`247
`
`Appendices
`
`Bibliography
`
`Index
`
`312
`
`248
`
`298
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`
`Preface
`
`It was 1952, and I was twelve years old. I bought a 3-D comic book about a
`Stone Age hero who used an ax to clobber dinosaurs. I am certain that dino-
`saurs are supposed to have become extinct several million years before men
`appeared on earth. Nevertheless, the combination of cave man and tyranno-
`saurus is a winning one, as any twelve-year-old boy or fifty-year-old movie
`producer will tell you.
`I wore cardboard goggles to see the illustrations in proper 3-D. The
`goggles had red and blue filters. After looking at the pictures for some time, I
`noticed that I was seeing the world bluish in one eye and reddish in the
`other. This occurred when I took off the goggles and looked around the back
`yards and vacant lots of my youth. Even now, years later, I will blink one eye
`to see if the world is tinted red and the other to see if it
`is tinted blue.
`
`Sometimes it still happens! Could Mother have been correct? Did those
`comic books really ruin my eyes?
`Soon many other publishers offered anaglyphic comic books, and I
`bought all I could find. Some were much better than others. The figures in
`the best ones appeared to be more than cardboard cutouts set against back-
`drops. Some artists succeeded in giving their drawings a fullness, a round-
`ness. I remember a little girl in one of the drawings. She wore a polka-dotted
`dress, and the polka-dots followed the contoured folds of her clothes. I re-
`member an aviator falling to his death, hands outstretched right off the page,
`practically touching my nose. His feet stretched far to the distant sky, a fro-
`zen, sculptured doom never achievable in flat comic books.
`I
`I became a connoisseur of anaglyphic comic books.
`I studied them.
`even projected their images using an opaque projector that I built. My
`school friends came to my home to see 3-D comics projected rear-screen on
`tracing paper, which I buttered for increased brilliance.
`I noted that some comic books used green filters instead of blue. Some
`used blue for the right eye and red for the left and others red for the right and
`so on. No standardization at all. It concerned me, even at twelve.
`I drew my own 3-D comic strips. I invented a character, a giant ape I
`called Might Mola. He was very much like King Kong. I shopped around for
`just the right shade of red and blue or green pencils for my drawings. I never
`found a truly satisfactory blue or green or blue-green. Always too much
`ghosting, or one image bleeding through to the other eye.
`
`8
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`PREFACE
`
`9
`
`Aug. 28, 1962
`
`hd.Lu PIEILJCE
`
`SENSORAMA SIMULATOR
`
`3,050,370
`
`Filed Jan. 10. 1961
`
`8 Sheets-Sheet 3
`
`5.
`
`I
`
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`
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`
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`7/I1
`\\\\\\\\\\‘\\\\\:u\\\\\\\\\\\&\\\\\ \\A\\\;/\);w
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`
`Sensorama simulator, essentially a three-dimensional nickelodeon. The observer
`sits with head in hood, as shown in this U.S. patent illustration.
`
`My method was to do a master drawing in black pencil and then to
`overlay a sheet of tracing paper. It was on the tracing paper that I made my
`red and green drawings, by carefully displacing the tracing paper left or
`right. The other kids in the neighborhood were playing stickball or running
`from gangs. I marched to the sound of a different drummer.
`Shortly after the first comic books, 3-D movies appeared. I remember
`my mother taking me to midtown Manhattan to see Bwana Devil at a first-
`run house.
`I
`loved it.
`(I forget what she thought.) Soon 3-D movies were
`playing at the local movie houses. I remember what I think was the chemical-
`smell of the polarizing glasses as well as that of the blue ink preview pages
`and rancid buttered popcorn at the Ambassador Theater in Brooklyn.
`I don't remember thinking that 3-D movies were better than comic
`books. They were merely different. The movie glasses were like sunglasses,
`neutral, not colored. I wondered why. I removed the transparencies from a
`View-Master card and tried to project them. My method was faulty. I sand-
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`I0
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`FOUNDATIONS OF THE STEREOSCOPIC CINEMA
`
`wiched the two together and placed them in the gate of a primitive 16mm
`movie projector. The superimposed images did not appear in 3-D when I
`wore polarizing glasses. I couldn't figure out why.
`By the time I was thirteen, or maybe fourteen, they stopped publishing
`stereoscopic comic books and making stereoscopic movies. I became inter-
`ested in puppets, in spaceships, in fourteen-year-old girls.
`Time went by, and I went to college. First I studied engineering and
`then physics. I decided to become a writer and got a job at Time, Inc., and
`after that I worked as an editor at Popular Photography. While there I wrote a
`story about Morton Heilig’s Sensorama simulator. Heilig still is a stereoscop-
`ic motion picture fanatic. His dream was to involve the viewer totally in
`simulated sensual experience. An individual sat with his or her head in a
`hood, eyes peering into a binocular-type eyepiece, observing stereoscopic
`motion picture image pairs that covered a great deal of the peripheral visual
`area. In essence, Sensorama was a stereoscopic nickelodeon, but with add-
`ed odors, vibrations, winds, and with a pair of built-in speakers providing
`binocular sound. It was a turn-on!
`
`I left Popular Photography, got married, moved to the West Coast, and
`began a career as an independent filmmaker. To support my habit, I decided
`to write a book about what I had learned as a fledgling filmmaker.
`It was
`called Independent Filmmaking.
`I made many films,
`I wrote many articles
`and another book, this one about super 8 techniques.
`About six years ago, while rummaging through a San Francisco store
`that specializes in odds and ends imported from Asia, I suddenly had what I
`supposed to be a very profound insight into stereoscopic television systems.
`From the time I was thirteen to the time I was thirty-four, the dream of mak-
`ing stereoscopic films seems to have lain dormant. But this dream of child-
`hood was a deep dream, and it never left me. I got in touch with a former
`physics classmate who had actually gone through the entire Ph.D. process.
`He liked my idea. Mel Siegel and I wrote a report to interest investors. He
`greatly improved my concept, and we came rather close to attracting the
`kind of money it would have taken to develop such a system. But a miss, as
`they say, is as good as a mile.
`Undaunted, I decided to do what I could and make stereoscopic mov-
`ies. My proposals to several grant-giving organizations fell on deaf ears, and
`in March 1976, when two such rejections arrived within a day of each other,
`I flew into a rage and decided to go ahead anyway. Because of the books
`and articles I had written about motion picture technology, a channel was
`opened to me to organizations that distributed motion picture equipment. I
`was able to borrow the components I needed for my project.
`I had to design and build my own stereoscopic system because there
`was, and in fact still is, no such system available. For small formats there are
`simple add-on mirror or prism devices, which can be used with existing
`cameras and projectors, but these have severe limitations. They produce a
`peculiar vertical field, they are limited to a fixed interaxial distance, and they
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`PREFACE
`
`I I
`
`do not work well with wide-angle lenses. For large formats, the situation is
`very little better. When I began my work, there were several 35mm motion
`picture systems available, but they also had a limited range of possible focal
`lengths and of other creative variables, and they are expensive to lease and
`
`operate.
`As it turns out, having to build my own dual rig out of two cameras was
`just the right approach, because with such a system it is possible to vary
`system and photographic parameters fully. Although my overriding intention
`was to make stereoscopic movies, I soon became involved in a study of how
`to build a good system. The best possible approach would be to build a good
`single-band system, with both left and right images on a single piece of film.
`But in order to know how to do that properly, dual-band experiments em-
`ploying two pieces of film, one for the left image, the other for the right, are a
`necessary first step.
`1
`The basic idea of a dual-band approach is to use existing apparatus and
`systems to the fullest so that as little as possible needs to be developed. This
`is an economical method, and one that can produce good results. I worked
`in super 8, because the hardware is small and light, and the software would
`be correspondingly inexpensive.
`I decided to use the same approach as
`many others entering the field. I employed a dual camera, made up of two
`cameras mounted on a common base for photography and two interlocked
`projectors for screening footage. These machines needed to be run in pre-
`cise synchronization, and I was in luck because there was a’ great deal of
`interest in super 8 double-system sound. For example, the apparatus used to
`synchronize a camera and a recorder could be modified with little difficulty
`to synchronize two cameras.
`I had no idea how terribly
`Like many others who came before me,
`difficult it is to make such equipment perform properly. The naive position is
`that since one is simply using two of this and two of that, stereoscopic film-
`making ought to be fairly simple. I had no notion that stereoscopic photogra-
`phy was in many ways substantially different from conventional, or planar,
`photography.
`I was giving a class in basic super 8
`At the time I began my work,
`filmmaking at the Berkeley Film Institute. One of my students, Michael
`Starks, turned out to be a person of considerable accomplishment as a re-
`searcher and writer. Michael's enthusiasm for stereoscopic filmmaking was
`as great as mine, and he proved it over the next five years by spending
`countless hours in the library, tracking down every article directly or indi-
`rectly related to the subject.
`The equipment arrived, and I set to work. In the first few months of our
`experimental and library research, we learned that the'basic information
`needed for making stereoscopic films had not been published. Whether or
`not it was known but never written down did not make a difference. What I
`needed to know was not available. Although there was scattered informa-
`tion about the necessary engineering of a stereoscopic motion picture sys-
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`I2
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`FOUNDATIONS OF THE STEREOSCOPIC CINEMA
`
`tem, this information had not been codified and was difficult to unearth.
`Even worse, no straightforward method for doing stereoscopic photography
`seemed to have been published. Several authors had written their versions of
`how to vary the photographic parameters involved, but the underlying argu-
`ments seemed oblique or incorrect; more important, my attempts to follow
`these recommendations did not lead to satisfactory results. Other authors
`seemed to obscure their methods deliberately, perhaps because they did not
`want competition.
`My research efforts were enhanced because there were several theaters
`in the San Francisco Bay Area engaged in a revival of stereoscopic films.
`Most of these had been shot in the early 1950s. The theaters screened films
`such as Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came from Outer Space, Kiss Me
`Kate, The Maze, and House of Wax. With the exception of the last film, they
`were all screened as they had been originally, using interlocked projectors.
`Although House of Wax was shot with a dual—system, it was projected with a
`single system, both images having been optically printed side by side onto a
`single piece of film.
`I also had an opportunity to view recent efforts: The
`Bubble and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. Although synchronization was not
`a problem, since these films were shot and projected single-band, there
`were other terrible problems. The system of photography employed often
`placed objects too far out into the audience, producing eye fatigue from the
`muscular effort needed to fuse such images. As bad, the left and right pro-
`jected image fields usually had eyestraining unequal illumination. With only
`a single exception (House of Wax), all of these films were projected out of
`synchronization, and it seemed to me that much of the photography was off
`the mark. To cite one troublesome area, many of the studio rigs produced
`eyestraining vertical misalignment between left- and right-image pairs when
`using different lenses, or with changes in focus. I've never yet encountered a
`double system rig that did not require repeated recalibration in the field, and
`it seems that the otherwise expert crews took the accuracy of the equipment
`for granted.
`The danger with stereoscopic filmmaking is that if it is improperly done,
`the result can be discomfort. Yet, when properly executed, stereoscopic
`films are very beautiful and easy on the eyes.
`It took about a year of steady work before I could achieve, on a routine
`basis, well-photographed and well-projected stereoscopic film.
`I had to
`learn how to tune my pair of Nizo 561 cameras and my Eumig projectors to
`get optimum results.
`I had to learn how to correlate creative camera con-
`trols: focal length, distance from subject to camera, and interaxial distance.
`After two years, I began to achieve an understanding of the psycho-optical
`(psychological-optical) nature of the system.
`This book is rooted in practicality. A major part of the work involved
`shooting, cutting, and projection of several stereoscopic films. At the mo-
`ment, there is a completed stereoscopic work, a half-hour film, Uncle Bill
`and the Dredge Dwellers, which has been screened for audiences in Toron-
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`
`PREFACE
`
`1 3
`
`to and Venezuela, at film festivals, and in several cities in the United States. I
`began work on the film before I knew how to tune my camera projector
`properly and before my thoughts on transmission systems (the working
`model used to explain stereoscopic photography) had come together.
`I needed to have this experience with actual photography, editing, and
`projection. I now realize that shooting a documentary-type film in the field,
`compared to working in a controlled studio situation, is something of a tech-
`nical tour de force. Working with a tentatively engineered dual rig, with an
`incomplete notion of how to do the photography, made it even more diffi-
`cult. Yet the proof is in the pudding, and Uncle Bill and the Dredge Dwellers
`is,
`I believe, one of the finest stereoscopic films ever made.
`In October 1980, my associate, Michael Starks, and I formed Deep &
`Solid Inc., an organization devoted to the research and development of ster-
`eoscopic motion picture and television systems. Together with our partners,
`General Electronic Services Inc., of Berkeley, California, and in collabora-
`tion with video engineer Jim Stewart, we have constructed a successful pro-
`totype of a three-dimensional television system which we hope will find
`acceptance with industrial users.
`Several months ago we formed a venture with Stereovision Internation-
`al Inc. to service the film industry with the optics and expertise needed for
`what we hope will be a flourishing revival of the stereoscopic medium. To
`date, we have serviced the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors with a
`promotional film, The Dimensions of Oldsmobile Quality (directed by Dave
`Seago, produced by the Sandy Corp.) and E.O. Corp. with a feature film,
`Rottweiler (directed by Worth Keeter Ill, produced by Earl Owensby). Both
`directors forced me to rethink my system of photography, and contributed to
`my understanding of the medium. The films appear under the Future Dimen-
`sions mark, using a system that places the stereopairs above and below each
`other on a single piece of 35mm film. The lenses for our system were de-
`signed by Chris Condon of Stereovision.
`’
`Readers of my other books may be in for a surprise. This is a more
`difficult book, and a warning is in order. Although this has certain aspects of
`a how—to—do-it book, the major portion is, by its nature, a monograph pre-
`senting original research. Readers seeking a more simplified approach are
`referred to Lipton on Filmmaking (Simon and Schuster, 1979), which con-
`tains a how-to-do-it section devoted to some of the tools used in this study.
`The early portions of the book are, by their nature, tutorial and histori-
`cal. It was necessary to discuss some of the fundamentals, since stereoscopy
`is an interdisciplinary art, yet lines had to be drawn. For example, trigonom-
`etry is used to obtain some results, but obviously this is not a textbook on
`basic trigonometry. The mathematics is roughly on an advanced high-
`school, or perhaps freshman college,
`level. Some readers will thumb
`through the book and challenge that contention. For them, or for the reader
`in a hurry, the results of mathematical derivations may be accepted at face
`value, and I have striven to explain all concepts in simple English.
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`
`14
`
`FOUNDATIONS OF THE STEREOSCOPIC CINEMA
`
`I admit that I have had a difficult time deciding on the proper tone or
`level of difficulty of this book. It has been my desire to reach the greatest
`number of readers; I am hopeful that filmmakers will take up the call so that
`stereoscopic filmmaking will proliferate. Yet the state of the art is such that
`large chunks of basic information have not until now existed. I had to invent
`or discover'much of what the reader now has in hand. This book, like my
`others, contains the information I needed to know in the years before I wrote
`it.
`
`Having achieved what to my mind is an entirely satisfactory stereoscop-
`ic transmission system, I realize that there are a number of stumbling blocks
`in the path of the beginner, not the least of which is the lack of suitable
`stereoscopic apparatus. Generally speaking, you cannot go into a store with
`cash in hand and leave with a stereo camera and projector. The equipment
`does not exist. Thus a major portion of my concern here is to communicate
`with the people who will be called upon to design and build stereoscopic
`motion picture and television equipment. Such advice will also be of great
`value to the filmmaker striving to create his or her own system. But such an
`exposition must be more complex than one aimed at the lay reader. It is my
`hope that this book will appeal not only to filmmakers, technicians, design-
`ers, and engineers but also to readers with a more general interest in film-
`making.
`When I discuss my system, I am both presenter and popularizer of some
`rather complex original material. In my desire to present my arguments fully,
`I may have forsaken simplicity.
`I feel that the state of the art is such that
`persuasion and completeness are more important than a streamlined ap-
`proach. On the other hand, it is also my desire to communicate with those
`who are not necessarily engineers or scientists. I have omitted some compli-
`cated exposition for this reason.
`At present, there are very few practitioners of the stereoscopic cinemat-
`ographic art. Occasional films are produced by only a handful of workers;
`unfortunately, most of these efforts are a disgrace and in fact retard rather
`than advance the craft. It is my hope that as a result of this study the situation
`will change and the stereoscopic cinema will flourish.
`Toward that end, I have provided an exhaustive bibliography, which
`includes selected patents. The inclusion of this material is meant to save the
`researcher valuable time.
`
`The title of the book, Foundations of the Stereoscopic Cinema, needs
`some explanation. Although I am not without my share of delusions, I am
`not egotist enough to believe that I and I alone have solved the vexing rid-
`dles of stereoscopic cinematography. The title alludes, if the reader will al-
`low, not only to my contribution but to the work of many others as well.
`Their efforts are reviewed in the historical section and in the portions of the
`book reviewing transmission systems.
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`
`Acknowledgments
`
`I would like to thank, in no particular order, the following persons, who
`helped with this study and the preparation of the manuscript: Bob Doyle, of
`Super8 Sound, for his encouragement and outright gift of synchronization
`equipment for both cameras and projectors; Michael Main, of Super8
`Sound, for his help with my projector interlock; Jon Rosenfeld, of Super8
`Sound, for documentation enabling the conversion of their crystal control
`units; Bob White, of Inner Space Systems, for carrying out the crystal control
`conversion; Joel Adams and William Paul, who patiently listened to my
`monologues about the future of stereoscopic motion pictures; Michael Sul-
`livan, of Eastman Kodak, who acted as liaison with the library at Kodak Park
`and arranged the loan of an Ektalite screen; Bob Jones, of Eastman Kodak,
`who arranged the loan of an Eastman 16mm projector for single—band exper-
`iments (optically printed from super 8 originals); John Corso and Jean Binge
`of W. A. Palmer Films and Michael Hinton of lnterformat, for working on
`optically printing double-band super 8 to single-band 16mm; Christy Stew-
`art, formerly of Hervic Corporation (which formerly distributed Beaulieu
`cameras), for the loan of a Beaulieu 4008 camera; Ernst Wildi, of Braun
`North America (formerly distributors of the Nizo cameras), for the loan of a
`pair of 561 cameras and his personal Bolex stereo projection lens; Stephanie
`Boris, who typed the bescribbled manuscript; Chloe Lipton, who served as
`model on many occasions; Chris Condon of Stereovision International, for
`his technical reading and suggestions; Jeffrey Thielen, of Eumig U.S.A., for
`the loan of a pair each of Eumig 810 and 824 projectors; Arnold Scheiman
`of the Canadian Film Board, for his optical printing tests; Maurice Soklov of
`the Berkeley Film Institute, for the loan of his Bolex stereo camera lens; the
`friend of Cathy Neiman, whose name escapes me, who graciously lent a
`Bolex H16M to a virtual stranger (please come and get your camera, or let
`me bring it to you); Michael Starks, who spent many hours in the library,
`which I imagine were both tedious and rewarding, ferreting out the many
`titles which appear in the bibliography and for suggesting many interesting
`experiments; Bill Hool, for checking the bibliography; Chester Roaman,
`who edited early drafts of the manuscript, just as he has on my previous
`three books; Ernest Callenbach, for his encouragement; Daniel Greenhouse,
`for his technical reading; Christopher Swan, for his illustrations; and Julie
`Henderson, who helped remind me that I am not out of my mind.
`I was fortunate to have this project funded by a grant from the California
`Arts Council and by three successive grants from the _National Endowment
`for the Arts. In an increasingly mandarin society, where credentials and doc-
`umentation of qualifications and team effort are the rule rather than the ex-
`ception, the eccentric loner, the creative nonconforming individual, needs
`all the help he or she can get.
`
`15
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`
`chapter 1
`
`A Technical History of
`the Stereocinema
`
`in-
`Before Sir Charles Wheatstone discovered the depth sense, stereopsis,
`quiry into binocular vision was pursued by only a handful of people. The
`rest of the world simply went about its business enjoying the benefits of
`seeing with two eyes, but consciously unaware of the depth sense, stereopsis
`(literally, solid seeing).
`The self-conscious awareness of stereopsis, together with the publica-
`tion of the discovery of this major perceptual modality, did not take place
`until 1838. Before Wheatstone, there were perhaps fewer than a dozen writ-
`ers who were concerned with and made any sort of contribution to the un-
`derstanding of this, one of the human race’s most important survival mecha-
`nisms.
`
`The combination of Wheatstone’s discovery with photography, which
`was invented the following year, became a very popular medium, and by
`the mid-1850s the parlor stereoscope graced many a nineteenth-century liv-
`ing room.
`Technical problems, primarily, have retarded the development of stere-
`oscopy, resulting in a culture with a marked planar bias. With the exceptions
`of theater, sculpture, and of course stereoscopic photography, our visual
`media are two-dimensional. Certainly depth cues are present, but these are
`extra-stereoscopic. Photography, rich in depth cues, and cinematography,
`even richer because of the possibility of motion parallax, nevertheless re-
`main planar, or one—eyed, media.
`
`16
`
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`A TECHNICAL HISTORY OF THE STEREOCINEMA
`
`17
`
`BEFORE THE STEREOSCOPE
`
`After Wheatstone announced his discovery of stereopsis, another distin-
`guished British physicist, Sir David Brewster, attempted to discredit the dis-
`coverer with these words: ’’It is, therefore, a fact well known to every person
`of common sagacity that the pictures of bodies seen by both eyes are formed
`by the union of two dissimilar pictures formed by each. This palpable truth
`was known and published by ancient mathematicians” (Brewster, 1856, p. 6).
`It may have seemed obvious after the fact, but it certainly was not obvi-
`ous before. Although there are a number of references to the specific issue of
`vision with two eyes, there is no clear understanding in the prior literature
`that the two slightly dissimilar left and right images were combined into one
`image with a new depth sense.
`In theorems 23 through 28 of his Treatise on Optics, Euclid deals with
`the geometric problem of observing a sphere with two eyes. He shows that if
`one looks with both eyes at a sphere whose diameter is less than the interoc—
`ular distance, more than a hemisphere is visible, and that if one looks at a
`sphere whose diameter is greater than the interocular,
`less than a hemi-
`sphere is visible. Writers in subsequent centuries repeatland amplify Euclid’s
`remarks, but this hardly serves to substantiate Brewster's claim. Although
`some philosophers have been interested in the problems of binocular vision,
`the history of the ‘subject is actually one of repeated exposition of essentially
`the same facts, without the insight Wheatstone was to provide.
`
`..
`
`It
`
`.
`'9‘
`
`1.1. Euc/id's sphere. ”When the diameter of the sphere is equal to the distance
`between the eyes we see exactly a hemisphere. In this diagram E is the right eye
`and D the left, CHFI the section of that part of the sphere BC which is seen by
`the right eye E, BHCA the section of the part which is seen by the left eye D, and
`BLC the half of the great circle which is the section of the sphere as seen by both
`eyes.” (Brewster, 1856)
`
`Galen, the celebrated Greek physician, published his On the Use of the
`Parts of the Human Body in the second century A.D., and it is he who sup-
`plied the first common-sense description of left- and right-eye perspective.
`Today a similar demonstration is often given in terms of holding a finger in
`front of one’s eyes and alternately observing the finger and the background
`
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`18
`
`FOUNDATIONS OF THE STEREOSCOPIC CINEMA
`
`behind it with the left and then the right eye. Galen’s description was some-
`what different:
`
`‘ But if any person does not understand these demonstrations [he refers to
`Euclid] by means of lines, he will finally give his assent to them when he
`has made the following experiment. Standing near a column and shutting
`each of the eyes in succession, when the right eye is shut, some of those
`parts of the column which were previously seen by the right eye on the right
`side of the column will not now be seen by the left eye, and when the left
`eye is shut, some of those parts which were formerly seen by the left eye on
`the left side of the column will not now be seen by the right eye. But when
`we, at the same time, open both eyes, both these will be seen, for a greater
`part is concealed when we look with either of the two eyes than when we
`look with both at the same time.
`
`According to Boring, (History of Experimental Psychology, A, 1957, p.
`105), it is to Galen that we owe the first physiological insight into the prob-
`lem, for he attempted to explain the singleness of vision by noting that some
`of the fibers of the optic nerve cross at the chiasma. Polyak (1957, The
`Vertebrate Visual System, p. 82) does not agree that Galen had such knowl-
`edge.
`Baptista Porta, a Neapolitan physicist, in his On Refraction (published
`in 1593), quotes both Euclid and Galen and attempts to explain why we see
`a single image of the world instead of a confused double image. Porta theo-
`rized that we actually see with one eye and then the other in rapid succes-
`sion. The idea is not nearly as foolish as it sounds, since this sort of effect is
`similar to what occurs in the well—observed phenomenon called retinal ri-
`valry, in which dissimilar images are presented to each eye.
`
`EEBALJ...
`
`‘~OPTtc Mt-LRVI-L
`
`<———— OPHC CHIASVIA
`
`/L
`
`X 2”‘ SYNAP.5is
`
`1.2. Optic pathway.
`
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`A TECHNICAL HISTORY OF THE STEREOCINEMA
`
`19
`
`With the coming of the Italian Renaissance, painters suddenly became
`concerned with depicting depth. Prior to the fifteenth century, painting in
`Europe was primarily used as a means to express religious motifs for church
`decorations, but with the Renaissance and the rise of the merchant princes,
`painters had new clients to satisfy. The psychologist Kaufman (1974, Sight
`and Mind, p. 215) suggests that ”one factor in the development of three-
`dimensional space in p