Hack #22. Depth Matters
Our perception of a 3D world draws on multiple depth cues as diverse as atmospheric haze and preconceptions of object size. We use all together in vision and individually in visual design and real life.
Our ability to see depth is an amazing feature of our vision. Not only does depth make what we see more interesting, it also plays a crucial, functional role. We use it to navigate our 3D world and can employ it in the practice of visual communication design to help organize what we see through depth’s ability to clarify through separation 1 .
Psychologists call a visual trigger that gives us a sense of depth a depth cue. Vision science suggests that our sense of depth originates from at least 19 identifiable cues in our environment. We rarely see depth cues individually, since they mostly appear and operate in concert to provide depth information, but we can loosely organize them together into several related groups:
Binocular cues (stereoscopic depth, eye convergence)
With binocular (two-eye) vision, the brain sees depth by comparing angle differences in the images from each eye. This type of vision is very important to daily life (just try catching a ball with one eye closed), but there are also many monocular (single-eye) depth cues. Monocular cues have the advantage that they are easier to employ for depth in images on flat surfaces (e.g., in print and on computer screens).
Perspective-based cues (size gradient, texture gradient, linear perspective)
The ...
Get Mind Hacks now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
