Here, here's an expiriment you can conduct at home with a pencil, paper, protractor, and any kind of narrow thin aiming device:
1. Go outside and using a small stand, or chair or whatever, tape a line on the groud, or mark one with chalk that it as straight as you can possibly get it, and at least 30 feet long.
2. Find an object like a tree or telephone pole, that is about 30-60 feet away from the line, somewhere near the line's center if you were to make a perpendicular.
3. Using the protractor, with it's straight edge paralell to the line on the ground, measure at what angle your sighting device points at the center of your object, when the Zero point on the protractor is directly over the left most edge of your line.
4. Go to the right-most edge of your line and mark the new angle for pointing at the center of the object from that position.
5. Now take some some grid paper and make a scale. Say one grid space equals one foot. Draw a scale model of your experiment on the paper. Start with the line being 30 grid spaces across. Then using the protractor find the angles you wrote down at each end of the line and draw lines that follow those angles until they meet.
6. Mark where they meet, and then count the number of spaces from the line to the point the two angled lines meet. Convert that to feet and that's actually how far away the object is in real life.
That's called triangulation, that's how we found out early estimates of things like the distance to the moon and other planetary bodies...and we still use it today by comparing telescope information from opposite sides of the Earth.
Your eyes perform a miniature version of this when you determine how far away other objects are.
As for the "experience" of the object, actually yes, Mercutio answered that as well, which had you bothered to do even the slightest modicum of research on the subject you would have understood that it is a gradual process of learning to match our real physical epxeriences to the informaiton we get from our senses.
An experiment done on infants shows that before six months old Infants really don't understand distance or depth at all. They will walk directly into, or over what would appear to be an open pit to any adult or child observer. (Luckily clear glass, lit invisibly, protects them.) At about 6 months they will stop attempting to cross areas which appear to offer no physical support as they begin to associate their visual perception of their surroundings with the notion of falling.
At 2 years they can be taught when there is an "invisible" shield present to stop the fall and when there isn't and to distinguish between the two.
We learn a piece at a time to associate how far away something is by touch, or by how many steps it takes us to get there. Then we start to associate those distances with visual cues. For instance we know on average trees are much taller than human beings. So a tree that appears to be the same height as a man about 6 feet away is probably much further than six feet away. And so forth.
In fact we get so good at it, we don't even have to think about it anymore, our visual processing just does it for us.
But it's not always perfect which is why we have optical illusions. Such as the fact that for not entirely understood reasons, the Full moon appears larger when it's near the horizon, even though obivously it isn't.
1. Go outside and using a small stand, or chair or whatever, tape a line on the groud, or mark one with chalk that it as straight as you can possibly get it, and at least 30 feet long.
2. Find an object like a tree or telephone pole, that is about 30-60 feet away from the line, somewhere near the line's center if you were to make a perpendicular.
3. Using the protractor, with it's straight edge paralell to the line on the ground, measure at what angle your sighting device points at the center of your object, when the Zero point on the protractor is directly over the left most edge of your line.
4. Go to the right-most edge of your line and mark the new angle for pointing at the center of the object from that position.
5. Now take some some grid paper and make a scale. Say one grid space equals one foot. Draw a scale model of your experiment on the paper. Start with the line being 30 grid spaces across. Then using the protractor find the angles you wrote down at each end of the line and draw lines that follow those angles until they meet.
6. Mark where they meet, and then count the number of spaces from the line to the point the two angled lines meet. Convert that to feet and that's actually how far away the object is in real life.
That's called triangulation, that's how we found out early estimates of things like the distance to the moon and other planetary bodies...and we still use it today by comparing telescope information from opposite sides of the Earth.
Your eyes perform a miniature version of this when you determine how far away other objects are.
As for the "experience" of the object, actually yes, Mercutio answered that as well, which had you bothered to do even the slightest modicum of research on the subject you would have understood that it is a gradual process of learning to match our real physical epxeriences to the informaiton we get from our senses.
An experiment done on infants shows that before six months old Infants really don't understand distance or depth at all. They will walk directly into, or over what would appear to be an open pit to any adult or child observer. (Luckily clear glass, lit invisibly, protects them.) At about 6 months they will stop attempting to cross areas which appear to offer no physical support as they begin to associate their visual perception of their surroundings with the notion of falling.
At 2 years they can be taught when there is an "invisible" shield present to stop the fall and when there isn't and to distinguish between the two.
We learn a piece at a time to associate how far away something is by touch, or by how many steps it takes us to get there. Then we start to associate those distances with visual cues. For instance we know on average trees are much taller than human beings. So a tree that appears to be the same height as a man about 6 feet away is probably much further than six feet away. And so forth.
In fact we get so good at it, we don't even have to think about it anymore, our visual processing just does it for us.
But it's not always perfect which is why we have optical illusions. Such as the fact that for not entirely understood reasons, the Full moon appears larger when it's near the horizon, even though obivously it isn't.
