EVIDENCE FOR GOOD RECOVERY OF LENGTHS OF REAL OBJECTS SEEN WITH NATURAL STEREO VIEWING

Six experiments are described in which good performance of the task of matching the lengths of two stationary real objects, gnarled wooden s ticks, under a variety of binocular viewing conditions, including vari ations in viewing distances was demonstrated. Relatively poor matching performance was observed when the sticks were viewed monocularly in o scillatory motion, or monocularly and stationary. The results suggest that stereo can support good representations of metric scene structure when length judgments of natural objects are required under (quasi-)n atural viewing. The implications of these results for theories of stru cture from stereo and structure from motion are discussed.