Final #2: Six Monocular Depth Cues

For this post, I found some monocular depth cues using the game minecraft! A monocular depth cue is something that makes what you're seeing appear 3D even though a computer screen is a flat 2D surface. An example would be standing behind something that obscures your vision in a video game; you are not actually "behind" anything because it is only a flat screen, so anything you cannot see ceases to exist for the moment, but it appears like it would if you were standing behind a tree in the real world, which would certainly block vision.

Since a tree was my example in the above paragraph, here is a visual of that. Here we are in a game on a 2D screen, but this tree appears to be blocking my view of the museum behind it.

Next is size differential, those red blocks way out there that create the torch of the Statue seem very small, thus making it look like they are far away, even though the screen is 2D.

Next is lighting, the blocks in the middle seem brighter because they are by a window, and the blocks to the left are darker because less "light" is hitting them, when in reality, there is no actual "light".

Here we have a canal, which fits into the part in the text at http://web3deducation.com/bc/MT35101/ONLINE_CLASSES/3D/CoreWeb3D_ch03.pdf about a rail road, the blocks "farther away" appear closer together to give the illusion that we are looking at something that goes off into the distance, when in reality there is no "distance" you could just reach out and touch your computer screen.

Another is detail, in this pic the mountain appears to be poorly detailed because we cannot see that far away, in reality it is just blocks appearing smaller, and being purposely less detailed to give the illusion of a real world occurrence.

Last is another example of size and distance, the first circled block seems bigger than the second, to make it appear like the second is farther away.



This is a final project using minecraft to explain some examples of monocular depth cues. It is a final exercise from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Discovering Computer Graphics. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc