Visual Rays are Parallel

Abstract

We show that human observers using monocular viewing treat the pencil of ‘visual rays’ that diverges from the vantage point as experientally parallel. This oddity becomes very noticeable in the case of wide-angle presentations, where the angle subtended by a pair of visual rays may be as large as the angular size of the display. In our presentations such angles subtended over 100 deg. There are various ways to demonstrate the effect; in this study we measure the attitudes of pictorial objects that appear to be situated in mutually parallel attitudes in pictorial space. Our finding is that such objects appear parallel if they are similarly oriented with respect to the local visual rays. This leads to ‘errors’ in the judgment of mutual orientations of up to 100 deg. Although this appears to be the first quantitative study of the effect, we trace it to qualitative reports by Helmholtz (late 19th century) and Kepler (early 17th century) as well as speculation by early authors (AD 500). The effect has apparently been noticed by visual artists from the late middle ages to the present day.