What is Reddit's opinion of Crashing Through: The Extraordinary True Story of the Man Who Dared to See?

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Related, and kind of the opposite, I read this awesome short autobiographical book many years ago that I highly recommend. It's called *Crashing Through and is about a man who lost his eyesight at three, but later in adulthood was lucky enough to be able to regain it from new work with stem cells.

It's fascinating because it points out how much of our vision is a result of our brains and brain development. Because he lost his vision at an early age those parts of his brain didn't develop, so even though he had the hardware back, the software still couldn't fully use the information. For example, he would see a bench or a car, but couldn't tell how far away it is (binocular vision is only responsible for telling us distance for objects within at most a couple feet from our face... after that it's either parallax (moving your head side to side) or just knowing how big and small objects appear to be due to our experience).

There's a really excellent short book called <em>Crashing Through: The Extraordinary True Story of the Man Who Dared to See</em>. It's about a guy who lost his vision at age 3, but when he was an adult was able to get stem cell treatment and regained his vision. One of the things it points out is all the different ways that we see 3D, not just binocular vision, and how much of it is developmental. Since he lost his vision so young, his brain hadn't fully developed those parts of vision so even though he could see, he couldn't tell how far away objects were. He'd always end up tripping over benches or jumping out of the way of things that were far away.

But it also talks about how 3D vision comes from binocular vision only for objects that are close to the face... like a few feet away. Things that are further are a combination of either parallax (how things changes as we move our head around) or just learned experience (knowing how big a car is compared to a bird, or whatever).

I encourage people with an interest in vision and 3D to read a great book called Crashing Through. It's a (short) true story about a man who lost his vision at a young age, but when he was an adult was able to receive a modern treatment to restore his vision (I believe it was with stem cells, but I don't recall). A large portion of the book goes into detail about how human vision works and it's actually way more complicated than people think.

The part that I find relevant to 3D films is basically how 3D films rely on binocular vision in order to generate the 3D effect. But it turns out that binocular vision is only responsible for the 3D-ness of an object if it's close to our face... like within a couple feet. Anything beyond that and the difference between the two images is not significant enough for us to gain any information from having a second eye.

So, what does cause 3D-ness for farther objects? Two things. One is parallax, which is how much the image of the object changes when either it moves or when we move our head. This movement is drastically greater than the distance between our eyes, and requires the use of our brain to remember images from several seconds ago and compare the differences. The other huge one, however, is experience. You see a car or a bench or a baseball, and you know how big those things are. And our brain then builds a 3D model based off of those assumptions. This is why regular 2D films still work so great for us, because sometimes the camera or the people move (giving parallax), but mostly because we just have experience with the every day world. It's also why trying to tell how big or small things like celestial objects are or fake objects like mecharobots are is so difficult.

The really fascinating part from the book (sorry it took so long to get back to it) is that while the man regained his vision, he had never developed the part of the brain that could figure out how big or small things were from parallax and from past experiences. So he would be walking down the sidewalk, and see a bench, and not be able to tell if it was near or far and would trip over it, or he would jump out of the way of cars that weren't near him.

This is the reason I never watch films in 3D, because it's not actually 3D: it's some sort of hyper 3D. Just look at these cameras (that one on the right especially). That's not how far apart human eyes are. Most 3D cameras you'll notice have exaggerated the binocular aspect of this. So, why does it not look super weird to us to see 3D films? My personal theory is because it's only ever used in films where we're already suspending our disbelief, so our eyes accept the gimmick any way. But the important thing is that it's exactly that: a gimmick.

So, yes, I agree that people should have the choice to see it in either format, I strongly discourage people from seeing it in 3D if you're at all looking for more inevitability. It's a gimmick, that's actually less real than 2D for most of the film.

That being said, I hear I missed out on not seeing Doctor Strange in 3D because those effects were supposedly super neat in 3D. i.e. the gimmick was worth it (I mean, nobody was watching it for realism anyway, right?)