On Sun, 13 Sep 1998 05:41:13 GMT, phr@netcom.com (Paul Rubin) wrote:
>In article <35fe3ac1.36982031@newsstand.cit.cornell.edu>,
>Neuman-Ruether wrote:

>>BTW, my opinion of people who complain
>>of the "distortion" of fisheyes is that they just aren't very
>>sophisticated visually (spherical [fisheye] perspective actually
>>is the perspective we see in, but we have been led to believe
>>otherwise....;-).

>Well, actually, we also see upside down, but our visual system
>makes adjustments for it. Regardless of whether a straight line
>in our field of vision images as a curved line on our retinas,
>we perceive it as straight. A fisheye picture with curved lines
>doesn't look any more realistic than an upside-down picture does,
>regardless of its resemblance to the images in our eyeballs.

Hmmm, actually our eyes do receive the image inverted
and with straight lines off center curved. Our brains do
invert that image, but, oddly enough, do not straighten the
lines...;-) The softness of our off-axis sight, our tendency
to concentrate only on the extreme center of our vision,
the "cropping" provided by our facial features, and the
strong "learning" experience we have all been put through
(photographs, TV, movies, paintings, drawings, etc.) lead
us to believe what is not true - that straight lines viewed
off center of our vision are seen as straight... For more
on this, you may find my article "On Seeing and Perspective"
on my web page, under "I babble", interesting...;-)