I was putting up some wall decorations earlier today and was painstakingly realigning everything until it looked level to my eyes. It might be just a hair off, but if I don’t correct it, I’ll see the misalignment almost instantly and get bothered for the rest of time until I fix it. Has anyone investigated, or is there literature on the minimum perceptible angle from level to the naked eye?
That’s actually a pretty good question.
With no exact answer, I do think this will at least in part depend on relative comparison to how exactly level your floor/ceiling/counter/table or other frame of reference is, which itself might not be perfect.
Side note, basically every smart phone out there has orientation sensors, so it should be just as easy as downloading a Bubble Level app from the app store.
Side note, basically every smart phone out there has orientation sensors, so it should be just as easy as downloading a Bubble Level app from the app store.
not when almost every phone has a camera bump, volume rockers and a power button.
i.e. no long flat sides, that still allow you to see the screen.
You do have a point, but most phones have one edge that doesn’t have any buttons, and most people have their phone in a case, which assuming it’s a proper fitting case, usually cancels out that camera bump issue and makes it sit properly flat on a table.
I haven’t
Bhad a case whichsisn’tdidn’t mirror the camera bump in a long while unfortunatelyDid your keyboard have a stroke? Haha, I more or less get you though.
different language auto-correct really didn’t help my inborn lack of spelling, and I (apparently) didn’t even glance back to check what I wrote.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. This begs the question, what even is true level?
Perpendicular to the normal vector to the center of the local gravity well
I’ll go you one further: WHY Even is true level?
Still only glancing off of the root of the issue: Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
I feel like I’m missing a reference here, but are you ok?
If everything else is wonky then “level” looks wrong.
The earth was flat for quite a while so not very
Your house isn’t level. Nobody’s is. Get it to look right and that’ll be good enough
I think it depends on 1) the person and 2) the context and 3) the desired precision. I would use an actual level to test against my intuition before I’d have confidence in it.
depends HEAVILY on the eye. some folks are really good at eyeballing shit. usually this goes hand in hand with other “visual calculus” skills like telling whether two things are the same size or determining angles at a glance.
reckon it’s just spatial reasoning + visualization + practice. i had an uncle who could look at a mechanical system and tell you exactly where all the wear would occur. i always thought it was some kind of savant trick until i started working on similar stuff.
the brain is just another muscle, you can train it to so all sorts of really amazing things!
It depends on the distance to object. Also the distance between the object and something to compare it to.
According to almost every photo I take, about 3 degrees off.
Pretty sure this is a psychophysics question, though I don’t know that field well enough to know what’s there.
Do you ever use a level to actually know it’s misaligned or do you just presume you immediately see all the misalignments?
No, just eyeballing it, the decorations just need to look good
I don’t know too much about this area, but I do know that this kind of task involves a bunch of complex processing in the brain. The more “Mechanical” aspects of vision could be described as visual acuity (sharpness of vision). However, gauging whether something is wonky would be a visual discrimination task, which involves more work by the brain. It’s an area in which one’s skill can be improved through learning, and some occupations have a lower discrimination threshold (I e. They can detect smaller differences).
I believe the vestibular system does this for us. It’s basically a little level in our ears.
