Perception, 2003, volume 32, pages 895 ^ 896

DOI:10.1068/p5042

Public perceptions

A ping-pong ball camera obscura

1 Introduction Descartes, in his Dioptrics of 1637, reported a demonstration (earlier carried out by Scheiner, though not as widely known) that a vertebrate eye did indeed operate much like a camera obscura. As Pirenne (1970, page 2) related it, Descartes and Scheiner scraped the tissue from the back of an ox's eye and placed the eye in a shutter, allowing light to enter the front of the eye. (Pirenne also reports his own similar experiments with albino rabbit eyes.) Descartes reported that he saw an inverted and reversed image on a sheet of thin paper placed where the retina would have been in the living animal. In effect, Scheiner and Descartes found that the eye was a kind of camera obscura. The camera obscura, a darkened chamber with a small hole admitting light to form an inverted image on a surface opposite the hole, had an enormous impact on thinking about vision (Wade and Finger 2001). It is still a useful device for illustrating pinhole optics and images they produce. Pirenne (1970) described differences in the projections of the optic array onto the curved surface of the retina versus onto a flat plane, and noted the difficulty of finding appropriate models of the eye that exhibit the geometry of retinal images. Here, I describe a model easily constructed from inexpensive materials. Analogous to the eye, it creates a camera-obscura image on a hemispherical surface. 2 Construction and use Construction details are simple. Blacken one hemisphere of a ping-pong ball to make it opaque. Drill a small hole (about 2 mm; ^ in) at the pole of the blackened hemisphere to admit light into the ball. (Larger holes produce brighter but blurrier images; a larger hole with a small positive lens of focal length near 40 mm, the diameter of the ball, would brighten and sharpen the image.) Roll a sheet of black construction paper into a tube (about 25 ^ 30 cm long), with a diameter slightly smaller than that of the ball. Ease the unpainted hemisphere of the ping-pong ball into one end of the tube, with the opaque hemisphere protruding and the hole coincident with the long axis of the tube. Tape the seam of the tube; tape the ball to the tube. The finished device is a black tube, with one blackened hemispherical end and one open end. Looking into the open end of the tube at a brightly lit scene, one sees an image on the ball's translucent surface inside the tube (figure 1). Indoors, light fixtures typically produce reasonably good images; bright sunlight outdoors yields better ones. All are blurred somewhat both by the imperfect projection through the pinhole and by the thickness of the ball; nevertheless, useful properties of the image are apparent. Images are inverted and left ^ right reversed. Moving the tube up ^ down or left ^ right reveals that the image moves in the same direction. If the tube were simply open, the direction of motion observed would be opposite the direction of the movement of the tube. In both cases, additional areas of the environment come into view. This simple camera obscura provides a means to explore a variety of visual phenomena, including depth perception (3-D phenomenology from a 2-D image), size ^ distance relations, projections onto a hemisphere versus onto a planar surface (shape constancy), and shape from motion. Pirenne (1970, chapter 6) examined a variety of geometrical optical effects in rabbit eyes that, in principle, could also be studied with the ping-pong ball camera obscura.

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Public perceptions

Figure 1. Photograph of a ping-pong ball camera-obscura image of a small table lamp, taken under strong incandescent lighting. Note that the camera-obscura image, as it would be viewed on the surface of the ping-pong ball, would be inverted (lamp-shade down).

Interestingly, as Denny (1993) described, pinhole optics play a functional role in some non-human biological systems. Nautilus, Denny illustrated, has an open-chambered eye with an aperture of about 1 mm diameter, but no lens. The aperture functions as a pinhole to form an image on the organism's retina.
Acknowledgment. I thank Heiko Hecht, John Kennedy, John Pittenger, and Hal Sedgwick for their most helpful comments on this paper. I am most grateful to Bobby Ayers for taking the picture in figure 1.

Patrick A Cabe

Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC 28372-1510, USA; e-mail: patrick.cabe@uncp.edu References Denny M W, 1993 Air and Water: The Biology and Physics of Life's Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) Pirenne M H, 1970 Optics, Painting, and Photography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) Wade N J, Finger S, 2001 ``The eye as an optical instrument: from camera obscura to Helmholtz's perspective'' Perception 30 1157 ^ 1177

2003 a Pion publication

ISSN 0301-0066 (print)

ISSN 1468-4233 (electronic)

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