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Wheatstone Mirror Stereoscopic Display System: C A Gatay Demiralp

The document discusses the Wheatstone mirror stereoscopic display system, which uses two monitors and v-shaped mirrors to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. The system was inspired by Charles Wheatstone's original 1838 design and allows adjusting the monitor distance and orientation. Wheatstone was the first to explain stereopsis and the disparity between the eyes that enables depth perception.

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Carolina Lucero
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53 views3 pages

Wheatstone Mirror Stereoscopic Display System: C A Gatay Demiralp

The document discusses the Wheatstone mirror stereoscopic display system, which uses two monitors and v-shaped mirrors to create a stereoscopic 3D effect. The system was inspired by Charles Wheatstone's original 1838 design and allows adjusting the monitor distance and orientation. Wheatstone was the first to explain stereopsis and the disparity between the eyes that enables depth perception.

Uploaded by

Carolina Lucero
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Wheatstone Mirror Stereoscopic Display System

Çağatay Demiralp

A Wheatstone mirror stereoscopic display is a reflecting stereoscopic display system with two monitors.
It is a slightly modified version of Wheatstone’s original design. User looks at 45 degree slanted, v-shape
mirrors. Left mirror reflects the imagery generated for the left eye viewpoint on the left hand side monitor,
and, likewise, right mirror reflects the imagery generated for the right eye viewpoint the right hand side
monitor. Monitors can be slided along the horizontal axis to adjust their distance from the mirrors. They
can be also rotated around the mirrors on the horizontal plane (see Figures ).

(a) Original design (b) Contemporary setup (c) Running system

Figure 1:

The fact that although we humans look at the world with two eyes we do not see two images of the world
kept the great minds, from Euclid to Leonardo da Vinci, busy for centuries. It was Charles Wheatstone
(1802-1875), a craftsman from London, who first gave a plausible explanation for having two eyes: the
disparity between the eyes causes a unique sense of depth (stereopsis), helping humans to judge how far
apart the objects are. He was also the first in separating accomodation from convergence. His paper dated
back to 1838 composes the basics of our contemporary knowledge on stereopsis [Wheatstone 1852]

“Under the ordinary conditions of vision, when an object is placed at a certain distance before
the eyes, several concurring circumstances remain constant, and they always vary in the same
order when the distance of the object is changed. Thus, as we approach the object, or as it is
brought nearer to us, the magnitude of the picture on the retina increases ; the inclination of
the optic axes, required to cause the pictures to fall on corresponding places of the retinae ,

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becomes greater; the divergence of the rays of light proceeding from each point of the object,
and which determines the adaptation of the eyes to distinct vision of that point, increases;
and the dissimilarity of the two pictures projected on the retinae also becomes greater. It is
important to ascertain in what manner our perception of the magnitude and distance of objects
depends on these various circumstances, and to inquire which are the most, and which the
least influential in the judgements we form. To advance this inquiry beyond the point to which
it has hitherto been brought, it is not sufficient to content ourselves with drawing conclusions
from observations on the circumstances under which vision naturally occurs, as preceding
writers on this subject mostly have done, but it is necessary to have more extended recourse to
the methods so successfully employed in experimental philosophy, and to endeavor, wherever
it be possible, not only to analyse the elements of vision, but also to recombine them in unusual
manners, so that they may be associated under circumstances that never naturally occur.”

Charles Wheatstone was also the one who coined the term stereoscope. His mirror stereoscope has been
a workbench for vision research in labs all over the world for more than a century [Wheatstone 1838].
Wheatstone’s original design is still preserved at the Science Museum of London.

Figure 2: Sketch of the high-resolution Wheatstone stereoscope installed in the graphics lab (Brown Uni-
versity).

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References
W HEATSTONE , C. 1838. Contributions to the physiology of vision–part the first. on some remarkable, and
hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of London 128, 371–394.

W HEATSTONE , C. 1852. Contributions to the physiology of vision–part the second. on some remarkable,
and hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London 142, 1–17.

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