There are various ways to evoke stereopsis without binocular disparities. Closing one eye, or looking through a synopter are well-known methods. Ames (1925) listed nine ways of generating this so-called `plastic effect', one of which involves a cylindrically curved lens placed in front of one eye. We investigated qualitative perceptual effects of this particular way of viewing artworks. A total of 38 participants viewed three digitally reproduced paintings.
Initially, they were asked to spontaneously report the perceptual effect of the lens. While being naive to the purpose of the experiment, 66% of the participants reported increased depth experience. In addition, participants reported increased contrast, color vibrance, and material expression (e.g. increased shininess).
During a second part of the experiment, we asked to report on seven qualities, Depth, Color, 3D shape, Realism, Detail, Light and Material. All qualities increased significantly except Detail, which seemed to show idiosyncratic results: the majority of the observers experienced a decrease of detail, while a minority reported, surprisingly, an increase of detail.
The data set contains the raw responses and also the data we used to perform analysis with Claude.ai including prompts.
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