She said she had acquired stereovision, to her own astonishment, in her... in her 50th year, and it was the most wonderful enlargement, and heightening of vision. She found the world almost intolerably beautiful, and enriched by this. The only analogy she could think of, she said, perhaps someone who had never seen colour, and then was suddenly given colour, and how much richer the world would be for them. But she also said she was very surprised, because it was her understanding, and the understanding of her doctors, and of the profession generally that stereovision had to be acquired by the age of two, or thereabouts, or it could never be acquired. One would be past the critical period, but her own experience had been contrary to this. Well, I was fascinated by the letter, and I turned to my visual team, to Ralph Siegel, and Bob Wasserman, who had been with me on other visual adventures, and we drove up to Massachusetts, where Sue was, and we saw her.
I was a little bit suspicious, I have to say, I’d never heard of such a thing, I wondered if she was deluding herself. And I had brought along with me some special stereograms, containing print at different stereo levels, but one could only judge this if one had stereo. But anyhow, it was quite clear that Sue did have stereo, although she herself called it shallow stereo. There was one interesting thing. I brought along some of these red and green glasses, as well, so that all of us could look at some of the red and green anaglyphs, as they’re called, and there was one anaglyph of a geometrical figure, and Sue looked at it and she said, 'That’s where the apex is'. And for her the apex was about four centimetres, an inch and a half above the surface. For Ralph and for Bob it was six or seven centimetres above the surface, and for me it was 12 centimetres above the surface. And I was very, very surprised at this, because I thought, you know, by simple trigonometry almost, a given disparity would be interpreted as... as a given amount of depth, of stereo depth.
This actually confirmed my feeling, which I had had since boyhood, and which I shared with my fellow members of the New York Stereoscopic Society, since stereoscopy had been a lifelong passion for me, that I tended to see the world in exceptional depth. That I was very strongly, and... and perhaps too exclusively attuned to stereo clues, but there’s no doubt that Sue had developed this, and, well, there is a long story. She sent me her visual diary, and I wrote a long article about her, an article which was actually, partly autobiographic, because I relived my own passion for stereoscopy, and... so that too was published. So then I had had long articles on Lilian Kallir, the musician, on Aphasic Pat, and now on Stereo Sue.
