Non-Riemannian approach to geometry of visual space: An application of affinely connected geometry to visual alleys and horopter (Q1092841)

A number of classical experiments, Hillebrand's parallel alley and Blumenfeld's distance alley amongst them, indicate that the geometry of 3-dimensional physical space is distorted by the perception process creating a visual space which is not Euclidean. This paper proposes modelling visual space in terms of an affine connection on it. The first part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the basic differential geometry required to give the model. The ideal is that the parallel and distance alleys should be geodesics for an appropriate affine of the path chosen (this is called teleparallelism). Distance alleys correspond to a connection with zero torsion. The second part of the paper gives some numerical calculations designed to show how the model accords with observed phenomena. The results appear to agree qualitatively.