Shouldn't eyes calculate sight differently?

[mumblemumble]

I have a problem with loss of eyes / scars. In reality if an eye is lost, all you really lose is depth perception from being able to tell how far away something is. If you have only 1 eye, but its 20 20, Its assumed you would have better vision than a lady with cokebottle glasses and 2 eyes...So why does losing 1 eye mean 50% sight? Really, depth perception isn't that big of a loss, you can still identify, work, measure things, ect, only very fine details are lost, effecting mostly eye hand coordination, not much else.

So, shouldn't losing 1 eye have a much lower penalty? Shouldn't a single bionic eye be better than 2 eyes, or as good? Maybe not, but I wouldn't say losing 1 eye would be as detrimental as say, losing an arm, or leg (1 armed colonists are really hurting to help out, but with 1 arm, that makes sense.

[Boston]

And even in reality, you can actually gain depth perception "back", once the brain gets able to compensate for the loss of the eye.

http://www.losteye.com/depthper.htm

[mumblemumble]

Well, yes and no....  its a very complex mental situation, 2 eyes does it very well because you see pretty much using internal trigonometry to tell "if i see x, and difference in angle between left and right eye is y, then distance must be z". Granted, we don't say this to ourselves, its all internal, but that is whats going on. This can be somewhat gained back by learning to guess based on size alone changing with distance with 1 visual picture, by retraining the mind to rely on size scaling instead of angle difference, but its never as effective, as if something has inconsistent size, this method is inaccurate. Though depth perception is only really needed in close up tasks anyways.

Good point though.

[RickyMartini]

And even in reality, you can actually gain depth perception "back", once the brain gets able to compensate for the loss of the eye.

http://www.losteye.com/depthper.htm

Damn that's interesting.