12 March

For years I’ve been able to see sometimes profound depth in single images, particularly where colours such as deep blues and blacks are used. And for all those years I’ve tried to find out why, because the traditional theory of depth perception says it’s the result of your eyes each taking in a slightly different image, which the brain then converts into depth or 3D. Two images in other words, depth is apparently not available in a single image. It turns out traditional depth perception theory is wrong, in all sorts of ways (not least because your eyes don’t take in ‘images’). The colour depth effect actually has a name - chromostereopsis, and you can see it every night pretty powerfully on Family Feud, which uses a lot of deep blue/black backgrounds, as you can see in the picture. See the depth there behind the 2 foreground figures? Excuse the sunlight reflection in mid-screen. For decades researchers and studios have tried to get people to take up 3D film and TV, and have always failed. People don’t like to wear the glasses, but it’s more than that. They don’t find ‘2D’ TV and films flat in the first place. 3D theory is a mess.