In Lecture 8, we talked about perceptual illusions, which help us understand how our perception is organized. Part of these illusions include depth perception, which enable us to judge distances. There are two types of depth perceptions: binocular cues (using both eyes) and monocular cues (using one eye). Focusing on monocular cues, this only requires one eye to obtain depth information.
Examples of monocular cue perspectives include interposition, which allows one object to block our view of another, showing that the object that is blocking is closer. Aerial perspective, which shows that with more distant objects become fainter. An example of this could be to look at a picture of mountains with more “hazier” mountains in the background. Another example of a monocular cue is linear perspective, which involves parallel lines appear to converge with distance. The more the lines converge, the greater their perceived distance. With texture gradient, we see fewer details (texture) the farther an object is from us. Finally, motion parallax shows us that close objects appear to move more quickly than objects that are farther away. An example of this would be looking out a car window and seeing that the mountains in the back are moving at a slower pace than trees or other objects in front.
A personal experience I had when working with depth perception was when I was in art class in the 6th grade and was told to sketch a long street, with houses and stores on both sides. In order to create the illusion of depth, I needed to draw the street convergence in the distance. To do this, I had to use a linear perspective in which I created parallel lines that represented the street, that got closer or narrower as they appear farther away from the viewer. By doing this, it looked like my street was covering great distance as you looked up from the drawing.
This was a great review of the cues considering how important they are. I also really loved the example you gave us. I believe that almost everyone can relate back to their elementary school art classes when we were asked to draw a road with houses on it and almost all of the class would end up with oddly shaped houses and an overall image that shows no depth. I believe that we all learned how to draw these pictures later on and learned the ‘tricks’ which made us all pros of some sort. Its great to look back on the past and relate what we are learning in college to how we drew pictures many years ago. Some of those things would be having words on the lose signs and not including them on signs that were far away. This was a simple trick but it was actually us depicting texture gradient. Another one of these tricks would’ve been interposition or occlusion to give a sense of foreground and background.