Teacher's Lab
The Science of Light
Alien EyesIntroductionLight in ColorLaws of Light
 
 

Sorry! That's not it.

The two images go with the left and right eyes like this:

Left eye

Right eye

Even if you were correct, you might find this exercise confusing. Try it with your own eyes. If that's too hard, try moving your whole body left and right to see the change. (By the way, in a real window you wouldn't see such a dramatic difference between the pictures—unless you had eyes that were really far apart. The images here are designed to help you easily distinguish between the right and left views.)

This phenomenon is called parallax. Think of looking out the side window of a car in the country: the fences go by fast, the trees more slowly, the distant mountains hardly at all. Closer objects shift farther than distant ones.

In the case of sitting on the couch, the distant objects "move" farther and the close ones less so even though it's exactly the same phenomenon.

When you are ready to take a look at a more complex task, figuring out where an alien's eyes are, select Go!

 
 
The Annenberg Media Projects