Perception, 2015, volume 44, pages 473 – 476

doi:10.1068/p4405ed

Guest editorial

PPP
I let PPP stand for Paradoxical Pseudo-Parallax. ‘Pseudo’ is expected to suggest that this
is not about parallax proper, whereas ‘paradoxical’ is expected to suggest that it actually is
about parallax proper, but with a twist, adding some emphasis.
‘Parallax’ is at the core of James Gibson’s (1950) ‘optical flow’. Many people like it
because it seems to offer a generic instance of ‘inverse optics’. In computer vision it actually
works to some degree (Barron, Fleet, & Beauchemin, 1994). I worked on the theory myself in
the 1970s (Koenderink & van Doorn, 1975). Of course, Helmholtz (1867) already understood
its basic importance.
Parallax is the monocular equivalent of binocular disparity. No doubt, this is where
newcomers in vision science make an immediate connection, because the entertainment
industry currently bets on stereo (Wheatstone, 1838). Stereopsis has become synonymous
with ‘binocular’. Hold a finger in front of you and close each eye in quick succession.
Notice the location of the finger in the visual field, relative to some distant background.
You immediately notice ‘parallactic shifts’. This is of stellar importance. Astronomers used
the stellar parallaxes due to the Earth’s orbit to measure the first true distances to the nearest
stars (Dyson, 1915).
Here I refer to sublunar phenomena, first suggested to me by paintings displayed at the
ECVP 2012 at Sardinia by Robert Pepperell (2012, 2013). Have you admired the tower of
the Spanish Bastion at Alghero? The paintings were displayed on its first floor. Rob is a
remarkable artist who is also a scientist. As an artist he knows how to ‘think with his hands’,
an ability I always look for in students, but ever so often miss.
The painting I refer to was special, because it was not the usual “planar surface with
colors arranged in a certain order” (Denis, 1890). The ‘canvas’ was actually not flat at all, but
bulged out towards the observer. At first I thought of it as a mere gimmick, but then I realized
that this adds binocular disparity, and parallactic movements, different from a mere planar
canvas. At the time the real import still escaped me, though.
When I listened to one of Rob’s talks (10 December 2013 at Leuven), it suddenly
dawned on me that his method is actually a ‘mechanical’ implementation of the optics of the
Zograscope (figure 1), an ancient optical instrument that has held my attention for some time.
I worked out the optics of the Zograscope, and together with Maarten Wijntjes and Andrea
van Doorn (Koenderink, Wijntjes, & van Doorn, 2013) investigated a modern reconstruction
psychophysically. It is surprisingly tricky to analyze the optics of the Zograscope. For instance,
the conventional field curvature of its huge lens is irrelevant, because only a small part of the
opening is used at any time. However, this effective part has an awkward shape—the union of
the two pupils of the user’s eyes, rendering conventional geometrical optics irrelevant.
On reading up on the weird and scattered literature on Zograscopy, it struck me that a
repeating suggestion is that the Zograscope ‘works’ because of its inferior optical properties!
Now what kind of an explanation is that? I had already discarded such remarks as bogus,
but looking at Rob’s work it occurred to me that the optical drawbacks of the device might
be to its advantage. The strong curvature of field essentially results in similar parallactic
movements as Rob’s mechanical implementation. Might there be something to it?
A problem with the idea is that such parallactic movements are unrelated to the image
content, and that occlusion effects are totally absent. However, the common scenario of
474 Guest editorial

Figure 1. The ‘Zograscope’ in use. [L’Optique, c. 1794, stipple over etching (part). British Museum
2008.7045.1].

something—a person, say—in front of a distant background is not dissimilar from a bulge
sticking out towards you. Moreover, I recalled Chris Tyler’s (1974, 1975) observations that
binocular stereopsis for smooth relief has surprisingly low resolution (see also Bradshaw
& Rogers, 1999). Maybe the occlusion effects would be irrelevant because of that. Might a
coarse overall parallactic movement be ‘captured’ by the contour of a foreground object in a
picture? Who knows? In order to know, one can only try.
At this point my ‘thinking with the hands’ started—for it happens in science as well as in
the arts. I downloaded an arbitrary photograph of a near object in front of a far background
from the Internet. In Mathematica I programmed a parallactic movement, hardly related to
the precise image geometry. I merely distinguished between center foreground and surround
background (figure 2). It can be done in a minute, involving just a line of code.

Figure 2. A photograph (left), and a simulated version (right) in which I have bulged the picture plane
in Pepperell fashion. (This shows Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits of 1961 by John Huston, after a
screen play by Arthur Miller; see http://www.desertusa.com/mag05/nov/misfits.html).

I then tried both a small movie for the parallax, and a stereo pair for disparity. Both
worked fine! (See figure 3 for the stereo.) I emailed the movie to Rob, and he immediately
saw the effect. I’m not at all sure whether Rob agrees with my interpretation, though; I look
forward to discussing that with him.
I noticed that the movie worked even better when I moved my head in synchrony with
the parallactic deformation (Rogers & Graham, 1982). Apparently, ‘my system’ accepted the
parallax as ‘due’ to my movement! This suggested that it would be even better to link
the deformations to my head movements. I rigged up some mechano-opto-electronics from
discarded parts—yes, I am a junk collector—and duct tape. It simulated mouse movements
to my Mac as I swayed my head sideways, and let the mouse movements pick the frames
of the movie. As expected (remember Rogers & Graham, 1979), this worked well, although
Guest editorial 475

Figure 3. This is a stereo triplet. Use the center and right images to cross-fuse, and the left and center
images to parallel-fuse. The scene looks like nice 3‑D to me, although I had only a movie still (no
disparity). The 3‑D doesn’t look much like the bulge in figure 2 right at all, although it ‘should’
according to inverse optics. It looks more like a regular stereo presentation. Are you surprised? Why?

it makes you look silly. An implementation using the iSight of my laptop would have been
sexier. But I enjoyed what my friend Whitman Richards calls ‘instant psychophysics’.
For most of us, this is what I propose to call the ‘Pepperell effect’. For academic use I
suggest ‘paradoxical pseudo-parallax’ (PPP) as more descriptive.
Of course, this isn’t really a proper experiment at all. It is merely ‘experimental
phenomenology’ (Albertazzi, 2013). But notice that the phenomenology is exactly what is
interesting about ‘real’ experiments. It is the ‘mental paint’ (Block, 2003), rather than the R2s
and p‑values. This is perhaps like the difference between the smell, taste, and looks, as compared
with the calories tables and price lists of dinners. The latter are objective, the former mere
‘first-person reports’ (ughh …). As a scientist, you should know what makes sense here.
It would not be a big deal to make a regular experiment out of my observations. All one
has to do is collect some forced-choice responses and distil sufficiently impressive tables and
statistics from these. Then one should keep quiet about what one guesses that the—obviously
naive!—participants actually experienced. Real scientists are not supposed to be interested in
subjective reports. But, fortunately, this is only an editorial, so I needn’t even bother.
Why should you be interested in the phenomenology of the Pepperell effect at all? Well, it
relates to the psychogenesis of visual awareness. That is what understanding vision is about,
although I may find myself in a singular position here—science couldn’t care less.
If a display of parallactic movements that has hardly any relation to the actual image
content works wonders in generating pictorial depth, then this renders the popular notion of
vision as inverse optics (Marr, 1982) somewhat doubtful. At least, it does to me. The effect
seems more similar to what ethologists call ‘releasers’, or ‘fixed action patterns’ (Uexküll,
1921). The parallactic movements signal that the visual object is not a planar surface covered
with colors in some particular arrangement. This opens the way for various ‘pictorial cues’ to
take the lead. What pops up in your visual awareness are hallucinations based on a variety of
template-like objects (Hoffman, 2009) from out of the depths of your mind.
Perhaps the Zograscope—this miraculous 18th-century optical ‘instrument’ that works
despite the fact that it lacks a scientific basis—depends at least partly on the Pepperell
effect after all. If so, one should cherish its ‘optical defects’! Here we enter another realm of
potentially interesting research. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Jan Koenderink
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Tiensestraat 102, B-3000
Leuven, Belgium; Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen, Psychologische Functieleer, Universiteit Utrecht,
Heidelberglaan 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands; e-mail: KoenderinkJan@gmail.com
476 Guest editorial

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