{"id":28834,"date":"2026-10-09T17:45:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28834"},"modified":"2026-10-09T17:45:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:45:21","slug":"28834","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28834","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has often been said that is better to show rather than just to tell. In that spirit, sometimes I find it useful to put together little interactive visualizations on the Web to illustrate an idea.<\/p>\n<p>Just this week I was trying to explain to some colleagues an idea I had about eyewear made from mirrors that lets you see to the left with your left eye, and to the right with your right eye. The question I was trying to address was how big your &#8220;visual aperture&#8221; can be. In other words, when is it like looking through a little peephole, and when is it like looking through a nice big pair of glasses?<\/p>\n<p>Not surprisingly, the nearer you place the mirrors to your eyes (the &#8220;eye relief&#8221; of the device), the greater the visual aperture. But at some point the eye relief can become too small &#8212; if the mirrors get too near to your eyes it will make you uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<p>The smallest comfortable eye relief is probably about 12mm (about half an inch). I created <a href=\"https:\/\/cs.nyu.edu\/~perlin\/beamsplitters\/\">this little visualization<\/a> to show how eye relief relates to visual aperture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has often been said that is better to show rather than just to tell. In that spirit, sometimes I find it useful to put together little interactive visualizations on the Web to illustrate an idea. Just this week I was trying to explain to some colleagues an idea I had about eyewear made from &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=28834\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28834"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28842,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28834\/revisions\/28842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}