Where things have gotten a bit out of hand is part two of this. It is really my sons fault, he was looking at our plasma TV the other day and said to me "Dad is that what stuff really looks like?" I didn't know at first what he really meant, he said that the high definition images look better than real life and wanted to know why. I confess I didn't really know why but that I would give it some thought. The next day while driving to a job i was thinking about what he said and saomething dawned on me. It looks better because it is teo dimensional, and the place that his eyes have to focus is on the one plane, so everything is always in focus. But when we look at something in real life, in 3D, we are only ever clearly focused on a region, a particular portion of our view. IF you hold your hand out in front of you near a window, and look at your hand, anythin in your peripheral vision is mostly out of focus. Move your attention to the window frame and your hand goes out of focus, move your attention to the outside and the window and your hand goes out of focus. So we are only ever looking at a smaller portion of anywhere at any one time. Our brain just automagically creates a 3Dimensional image out of what we see, judging how far objects are away by not only knowing how big something is by experience, but also by the fact that our two eyes have to converge on the object (or area) to focus, the math is then approximated in our heads to get a judged distance from what we are looking at. Thus a 3D image is built up in our minds ion a fraction of a second. This is why the HD image on the Plasma looked better than real life to him.
Like anyone who drives a lot in his job, my projects are never far from my mind. I had an inspiration building as an addon to my already out of hand robotic project. How could I use this method to build a 3D map of my surreoundings for my Robot.