A Room with a Cue: The Efficacy of Movement Parallax, Occlusion, and Blur in Creating a Virtual Window

In indoor environments, having a view from a window plays an important role in human physical and psychological well-being—particularly if the view contains natural elements. In places where physical windows are absent or the view is highly artifact-dominated, virtual windows can potentially play a beneficial role. The current paper presents a research experiment on the efficacy of three monocular depth cues, that is, movement parallax, blur, and occlusion, in engendering a window-like “see-through experience” using projected photorealistic scenes. Results indicate that all three cues have a significant main effect on the viewer's see-through experience, with movement parallax yielding the greatest effect size. The effects of the remaining two cues are largely qualified by their interactions with each other and with movement parallax. These results provide a first step in identifying and testing the perceptual elements that are essential in creating a convincing virtual window.

Attack Behaviour and Distance Perception in the Australian Bulldog Ant Myrmecia Nigriceps

The behaviour of the Australian bulldog ant Myrmecia nigriceps (Fr. Smith) has been studied by using moving targets characterized by sizedistance equivalence in relation to a stationary zero-point. The attack behaviour of freely moving animals demonstrated that the ants can discriminate between different targets, in the range of 5–80 cm, using movement parallax to extract information about the targets. By studying the antenna response it was possible to demonstrate that the stationary bulldog ant can utilize binocular disparity information and that this mechanism has an effective range of about 90 mm.