| Progression is, of course, not necessarily progress. Many will resist this next step, just as many in the past resisted the introduction of movies, talkies, and colour. Many people certainly resist the retroactive introduction of colour to films originally shot in black-and-white. Whatever the arguments mustered by critics of colourization (and there are many good ones), the idea that black and white is somehow more natural, is totally unfounded. There is nothing natural about black-and-white unless you are totally colour-blind. 1
The same argument applies to two-dimensional images, which are as artificial as black-and-white images. 2-D representations of our 3-D world are cultural artifacts. This is demonstrated by anthropological studies in which people, who have no previous experience of photographs and paintings, have trouble interpreting them. Adding this third dimension of depth to the current two-dimensional movie is the next logical step toward a more accurate representation of the world-as-we-perceive-it in our everyday experience. (Indeed, the third dimension is often used as a metaphor for reality, when an unreal character in a novel or film is described as being two-dimensional.)
During the four years I spent with him at Cornell University as a graduate student, I never understood what J. J. Gibson was talking about. This did not prevent him from being one of my most important intellectual influences - I knew he was very excited about something (whatever it was) and I wanted to share that excitement. Finally, I realize what he was excited about. A person builds his/her subjective map of the objective world by exploring and manipulating it. Most psychologists, by fixing the eyes of the subject with respect to the head, the head with respect to the body, the body with respect to the environment, in order to control extraneous variables, were creating artifacts peculiar only to this artificial experimental situation. One such artifact was two-dimensional perception, which could be enhanced into three-dimensional perception by means of various depth cues. In three brilliant books [GIBSON J 50, 66, 79], he elaborated on his argument that we live in a three-dimensional world and the eye is therefore designed to perceive objects in 3D. 2
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