Aaron Hertzmann

Hard disagree. Cameras and their sensors are just different from the human eye. This doesn't make them capture reality "how it is", they just have different capabilities and they make different trade-offs. They are certainly different, but not necessarily "more real". Cameras don't capture "reality". An insightful link on this topic, shared previously here on HN, which is very illuminating: "Photography is not objective" [1] [1] https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/03/17/photography-is-not-objective.htm…

I would recommend subscribing to the RSS feed: all of the articles are frankly superb. https://aaronhertzmann.com/feed.xml

If liked this, you might also like: https://aaronhertzmann.com/2024/06/10/perspective-distortions.html https://aaronhertzmann.com/2024/09/09/dvc-multiperspective.html

Renders looking too small reminds me of this article: https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/02/28/how-does-perspective-work.html Maybe you're looking for something like "Natural Perspective"?

The blog post linked in required reading (https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/02/28/how-does-perspective-work.html ) was fascinating. It also had the line > Even more confusing, there’s some evidence that people with very different cultural backgrounds may vary in perspective perception in some cases. Which sounds fascinating but they didn't expand.

Figure 4 in the article [1] is absolutely fascinating and seems to prove conclusively that the edge detection hypothesis is completely misguided: when one retains only the edges (B) of the original image (A), all meaning is lost and the resulting image is unrecognizable. What A has that B lacks is shapes. There is obviously a rotund shape of the face that is reconstructed by the brain, that one can almost see, although technically it's not actually present in A. Not present, yet visible. Same for the eyes, smile, cheekbones. It must trigger some kind of pattern-matching in the brain. This problem seems to be similar to the famous optical illusion of the old woman / young woman [2] that works well also in strict black and white. In this optical illusion there is surprisingly little information on the image, yet it can trigger two very different representations (that one can see alternatively, but never at the same time). I think the brain tries to fit the shapes it sees in one box or another, and when it finds a box it builds a whole concept around it. I also think that boxes have to pre-exist or be learned: they can't be inferred from an image, if one has never encountered the original representation in the wild. One evidence for this is children are completely blind to optical illusions that have one "innocent" representation and one involving some kind of nudity or sexual activity, while adults tend to see the NSFW version first. And so, to come back at the…