Sunday, March 2, 2014

Which one is the Golden Rectangle?



Imagine that you are floating inside the center of a very large transparent sphere, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian man above. The yellow area is our normal 60º field of undistorted view. Outside of that yellow field, things start getting weird. Our binocular vision receives two sets of images (our overlapping yellow circles in the illustration above), and sends them back to the brain for processing via the curved camera lenses of our eyes. Through comparison between these two images and a little high-speed triangulation our brains tell us how far away things are. Harry Moss Traquair described our visual field in 1927 as, "an island of vision surrounded by a sea of blindness." 

Numerous studies by “Golden Sectionists” trying to prove Man’s natural attraction towards the Golden Rectangle have found that people are just as likely to choose any horizontal rectangle that roughly conforms to the one that circumscribes the yellow shape, above [Or roughly 1:1.5, and not the Golden Ratio of 1:1.618]. 

Which one is the Golden Recatngle?

Our natural affinity for this shape is possibly its relation to our undistorted field of vision and not, after all, anything to do with nautilus shells. See if you can pick out the Golden Rectangle from the group of quadrilaterals, above. 

[I'll put the answer in the comments, below]