#941: Depth Perception explain

[The entire comic is narrated by Cueball, and never spoken by the Cueball shown in the examples. All dialog is shown in rectangular frames overlaid on the comic panels.]

[In the first panel the background shows a cloudy sky in color, with the clouds all running together and appearing as a blue gray smear. Towards the bottom the horizon and the ground appear dark almost black at the very bottom. Two frames with two lines of text are at the top left and right, similar below except the one to the left has four lines and the one to the right only one line.]

I’ve always had trouble with the size of clouds.

I know they’re huge. I can see their shapes.

But I don’t really see them as objects on the same scale as trees and buildings.

They’re a backdrop.

[The next panel is split in three parts. The top part is in a single frame. The middle part is frame-less and only has text - the only narrating not inside one of the frames. Then at the bottom there are two frames overlaid over three small panels in a row]

[In the top part of the 2ns panel stands Cueball on a flat disk inside a hemispherical dome with the front half cut away. The dome is about three times as tall as Cueball. Above the dome there is one frame with text. There is also two labeled arrows pointing to the dome and the disk.]

Stars are the same way.

Arrow up: Sky

Arrow down: Ground

[Text in between the top and the bottom panels:]

I know they’re scattered through an endless ocean, but my gut insists they’re a painting on a domed ceiling.

[The next two frames with text is overlaid above (three lines of text) and below (one line of text) the three panels described first. Those three panels are all inverted with black background and white Cueball:]

[Left panel: Cueball stands on a curved surface, looking up.]

[Middle panel: The perspective of the scene shifts, suddenly the surface Cueball is standing on is in the top left of the panel. Cueball is now looking down, leaning back, and waving his arms trying to regain balance.

[Right panel: The perspective of the scene returns to normal, Cueball is now semi-crouched, staring at the ground with legs spaced apart to help him balance.]

If I try hard enough, I get a glimmer of depth, a dizzying sense of space,

But then everything snaps back.

[An American football field is shown with Cueball drawn very small near the middle. Sections at the left tips of each of the goal posts are highlighted and shown as a zoomed view in an insert box. These insert shows the two webcams mounted on the top of the very tip, one for each goal posts. There are two frames with text above the field, the top one most to the left with one line, the second directly below it with two lines, and below the field there is also one frame with one line in it.]

So one summer afternoon

I set up two HD webcams hundreds of feet apart,

Pointed them at the sky,

[The next two frames with two lines of text each are stretched over the two middle panels in this second row of panels:]

[The first panel shows a pair of glasses and a smartphone with an attachment designed to clip onto the glasses. The smartphone screen is setup to display two images side by side such that one camera is visible in the left half of the screen, and the other camera is visible in the right half of the screen. There are four arrows pointing to the two items and to each of the two parts of the screen. They all have labels which are between the two lines of text, but here shown below for clarity.]

[The next panel shows the completed phone glasses assembly.]

And fed one stream to each of my eyes.

The parallax expanded my depth perception by a thousand times,

Arrow top left: Right camera

Arrow top right: Smartphone

Arrow bottom left: Very strong reading glasses

Arrow bottom right: Left camera

[Cueball stands wearing the phone glasses assembly, one hand held up to the device, staring into the sky. There are two frames one above and one below with two lines of text each:]

And I stood in my living room

At the bottom of an abyss

[Another colored panel with blue sky and clouds below the top part of the panel from left to right. Cueball is now a giant who stands in the middle of the frame on the shore of a coastline with a small island off the coast, only a step away for him. A city is near his right foot and the tallest skyscraper appears ankle high. A mountain range is behind him with mountains that are also only barely ankle high. A river flows past the mountains and joins another coming from them on it’s way down towards the coast. Cueball is standing with his head well above cloud level as clouds swim around him. At the top above and left of his head the last frame with one line of text is located:]

Watching mountains drift by.