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The article is close, but doesn't quite get there. The problem is not the image itself or how it's taken, but rather how it's displayed. When you look at the wo

The article is close, but doesn't quite get there. The problem is not the image itself or how it's taken, but rather how it's displayed. When you look at the world through your eyeballs, your brain recreates the scene so that it wraps around an imaginary point in mental space, so to speak. Things that are to your right "appear to your right" in your mind. When you're looking at a photograph, regardless of how much field of view it was taken with, it's displayed in a very small portion of your entire field of vision, even if you're looking at it on a computer monitor; it's even worse if you're looking at it on a phone. You're basically always looking at it zoomed out. It would be possible to recreate the scene exactly as it would have appeared if your eye was where the camera was when the photo was taken, but you'd need to blow it up on a huge screen, like a movie theater screen, and stand fairly close to it. Then you'd be able to see that actually most lenses other than fisheyes have fairly narrow field of views.

hoseja 5y ago
I love photospheres for this reason. Damn, I haven't been outside properly and taken a nice photosphere in a long time.
blocko 5y ago
They mention this under the "What if there is no true perspective?" section: Second, they point out that viewers almost always view pictures from the “wrong” location. A cornerstone of linear perspective is the idea that the viewer must be at the focal center of the image to view it correctly. If you view a linear perspective image from the focal center, it should be like looking through a window—indeed, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that linear perspective images only work from the focal center. Yet, in reality we don’t do this. Most of the photos we look at would have to be viewed with one’s eye a few inches from the page. People in art galleries walk all around and view paintings from all sorts of angles. Hence, the whole idea of linear perspective falls apart.
radlad 5y ago
Photography + VR headsets will be interesting.
- eurekin 5y ago
  I'm wondering for years already, why there's no head mounted display for mirrorless
hammock 5y ago
An easy way to make your point is to do what "artistic types" in e.g. cartoons do to make a viewfinder to estimate a shot: use your thumbs and forefingers in front of your face to make a rectangular "window." Now recognize how much smaller this window is than your field of view.
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  That's exactly how I came to understand the effect. I was looking at a picture of a sunset I had taken and wondering why the sun looked so much smaller than when I was there. I remembered that the sun, like the moon, is roughly the size of the thumbnail when the arm is completely stretched out, so I zoomed in the image until the sun was the right angular size, and the sizes of all the objects then appeared as in real life, only observed through tunnel vision.
codeflo 5y ago
I was looking for someone commenting this. There's no mystery, it's really just geometry. Imagine casting a ray from your eyeball to a pixel on the monitor. Then imagine the same ray at the same angle on the actual scene. If the pixel matches the correct part of the scene, then the image appears natural. But that's really a tiny field of view. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is that it's the same geometry as having a monitor-sized window in a wall at the same distance, and looking outside. That would be really tiny window, and you wouldn't expect to see much of the outside without getting a lot closer. As a result, most pictures are taken at a wider field of view than what would be natural for typical viewing distances, to show more of the scene. Which explains the distortions that make everything at a distance appear tiny. You fundamentally can't "solve" this without dramatically increasing the FOV that you're viewing things with -- VR being the obvious idea.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  The mystery is "why can I view the world with my eyes and see a wide angle, straight lines, and "natural" perspective, but when I take pictures with a wide angle, everything looks "weird." You can throw away the straight lines and shoot with a fisheye lens (no straight lines, wide angle, fairly natural depth), you can crop in (depth fine, but now I'm missing stuff around the edges), and you can shoot with a wide rectilinear lens (wide angle, straight lines, "exaggerated" perspective). As far as I know, the answer is simply that your eyes aren't rectilinear but your brain fudges it to make straight lines seem straight when the image on our retina actually curves. The effect is most prominent when standing in a small room. It's impossible to take a single picture of it that conveys what you want: a wide rectilinear lens will exaggerate how big the room is (and look weird around the edges), a "normal" rectilinear lens will be so cropped in that you can't see most of the room, and a fisheye lens will make all straight lines curve, especially around the edges. None of them really represent the visual experience of being in the room. Just look at how weird real-estate listings can get when they try to show you a picture of a small bathroom.
  - c1ccccc1 5y ago
    Probably a big part of it is that the high-resolution area of the retina is quite small. So in that small area, the perspective is close to perfect, and then we mentally stitch together a larger image by moving our eyes around. But the larger image that's stitched together is in the shape of a sphere rather than a flat surface, with each point on the sphere corresponding to a direction the eyes could be pointing.
tempestn 5y ago
While I was reading this article I actually pulled out my phone and moved it around near my eye until I could get the camera picture to 'line up' with its surroundings. It was indeed possible (and somewhat trippy), but the phone was about 2.5" from my eye. So yeah, assuming you're not holding your phone that close (as no one is, since few people can even focus that close, myself included,) it's going to be smaller than reality.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blahburn 5y ago
I think that's why you see people taking photos with their iPads, in many cases, it feels more real because it's a larger representation of the photo.

hoseja 5y ago

I love photospheres for this reason. Damn, I haven't been outside properly and taken a nice photosphere in a long time.

blocko 5y ago

They mention this under the "What if there is no true perspective?" section: Second, they point out that viewers almost always view pictures from the “wrong” location. A cornerstone of linear perspective is the idea that the viewer must be at the focal center of the image to view it correctly. If you view a linear perspective image from the focal center, it should be like looking through a window—indeed, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that linear perspective images only work from the focal center. Yet, in reality we don’t do this. Most of the photos we look at would have to be viewed with one’s eye a few inches from the page. People in art galleries walk all around and view paintings from all sorts of angles. Hence, the whole idea of linear perspective falls apart.

radlad 5y ago

Photography + VR headsets will be interesting.

eurekin 5y ago
I'm wondering for years already, why there's no head mounted display for mirrorless

hammock 5y ago

An easy way to make your point is to do what "artistic types" in e.g. cartoons do to make a viewfinder to estimate a shot: use your thumbs and forefingers in front of your face to make a rectangular "window." Now recognize how much smaller this window is than your field of view.

deadbeeves 5y ago
That's exactly how I came to understand the effect. I was looking at a picture of a sunset I had taken and wondering why the sun looked so much smaller than when I was there. I remembered that the sun, like the moon, is roughly the size of the thumbnail when the arm is completely stretched out, so I zoomed in the image until the sun was the right angular size, and the sizes of all the objects then appeared as in real life, only observed through tunnel vision.

codeflo 5y ago

I was looking for someone commenting this. There's no mystery, it's really just geometry. Imagine casting a ray from your eyeball to a pixel on the monitor. Then imagine the same ray at the same angle on the actual scene. If the pixel matches the correct part of the scene, then the image appears natural. But that's really a tiny field of view. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is that it's the same geometry as having a monitor-sized window in a wall at the same distance, and looking outside. That would be really tiny window, and you wouldn't expect to see much of the outside without getting a lot closer. As a result, most pictures are taken at a wider field of view than what would be natural for typical viewing distances, to show more of the scene. Which explains the distortions that make everything at a distance appear tiny. You fundamentally can't "solve" this without dramatically increasing the FOV that you're viewing things with -- VR being the obvious idea.

roywiggins 5y ago
The mystery is "why can I view the world with my eyes and see a wide angle, straight lines, and "natural" perspective, but when I take pictures with a wide angle, everything looks "weird." You can throw away the straight lines and shoot with a fisheye lens (no straight lines, wide angle, fairly natural depth), you can crop in (depth fine, but now I'm missing stuff around the edges), and you can shoot with a wide rectilinear lens (wide angle, straight lines, "exaggerated" perspective). As far as I know, the answer is simply that your eyes aren't rectilinear but your brain fudges it to make straight lines seem straight when the image on our retina actually curves. The effect is most prominent when standing in a small room. It's impossible to take a single picture of it that conveys what you want: a wide rectilinear lens will exaggerate how big the room is (and look weird around the edges), a "normal" rectilinear lens will be so cropped in that you can't see most of the room, and a fisheye lens will make all straight lines curve, especially around the edges. None of them really represent the visual experience of being in the room. Just look at how weird real-estate listings can get when they try to show you a picture of a small bathroom.
- c1ccccc1 5y ago
  Probably a big part of it is that the high-resolution area of the retina is quite small. So in that small area, the perspective is close to perfect, and then we mentally stitch together a larger image by moving our eyes around. But the larger image that's stitched together is in the shape of a sphere rather than a flat surface, with each point on the sphere corresponding to a direction the eyes could be pointing.

tempestn 5y ago

While I was reading this article I actually pulled out my phone and moved it around near my eye until I could get the camera picture to 'line up' with its surroundings. It was indeed possible (and somewhat trippy), but the phone was about 2.5" from my eye. So yeah, assuming you're not holding your phone that close (as no one is, since few people can even focus that close, myself included,) it's going to be smaller than reality.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blahburn 5y ago

I think that's why you see people taking photos with their iPads, in many cases, it feels more real because it's a larger representation of the photo.