Where should you sit to watch a movie?
Martin S. Banks, Heather F. Rose, Dhanraj Vishwanath, Ahna Reza Girshick · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
When a picture is viewed from positions other than its center of projection, there can be large changes specified in the retinal image, yet the perceived spatial layout and shape of objects do not seem to change. We have shown that compensation for oblique viewing occurs provided that the viewer can estimate the slant and tilt of the picture surface accurately (Vishwanath, Girshick, & Banks, 2004). Compensation is nearly veridical with binocular viewing at close range. Compensation generally does not occur with monocular viewing through a small aperture; instead, the percept is dictated by the shape of the retinal image. The mechanism for compensation appears to operate locally; that is, separately for each part of the picture. Our findings help to explain invariance for incorrect viewing positions, and other phenomena like perceived distortions with wide fields of view and the anamorphic effect. Our findings also have relevance to the design of displays. We will discuss, for example, how the viewer’s position ought to affect percepts depending on the shape of the display surface.