Cyclopean stimuli

Cyclopean stimuli is a form of visual stimuli that is defined by binocular disparity alone.

It was named after the one-eyed Cyclops of Homer’s Odyssey by Bela Julesz. Julesz was a Hungarian radar engineer. He thought that stereopsis might help to discover hidden objects, this might be useful to find camouflaged objects. The important aspect of this research was that Julesz showed using random dot stereograms (RDSs) that disparity is sufficient for stereopsis, where Charles Wheatstone had only shown that binocular disparity was necessary for stereopsis. Ironically, the Cyclops would not have been able to see a cyclopean stimulus, because having only one eye, he would not have been able to perceive binocular depth cues such as binocular disparity.