Spherical Photography as Metaphor

Spherical photographs provide rich ways of exploring remote locations and giving a “you are there” experience. But in addition to photographic value, they also offer an interesting metaphor for seeing our world more clearly.

To understand how the metaphor might work, consider the following illustration.

Imagine seeing a scene of impending violence, perhaps someone threatening another person with a baseball bat. Looking at the scene, what would be an appropriate response? One choice might be to yell and distract the people, hoping to stop the conflict, or perhaps even physically intervene, if strong enough. Another option might be to back away slowly while calling for help. For someone quite frail, perhaps running away would be the best choice.

Now imagine you look around, away from the violent actions. As you change the view, you see someone standing with a bored look holding a clipboard. Hardly the kind of thing you would expect at a confrontation. Continuing to look around even more, you see lights on stands, several more people watching the confrontation, and finally, a movie camera.

Suddenly the context changes completely as you realize that this is a movie set. Now what are some reasonable actions?

Now good choices might be to stand still, or applaud at the right point, or perhaps move to stay out of the way of the camera. In any case, the correct set of actions is completely different now that we have the full picture.

So it is with our view of reality. Our natural belief is that human senses (and perhaps rational thought) give a correct picture of the world, leading us to believe that what we see is all there is. Unfortunately, it’s been shown many times that the way we see the world is often wrong, and we can even miss things that are right in front of us.

How much easier it is to miss things that require a little more effort to see!

In either case, it takes deliberate effort to see what’s there, and this is beautifully illustrated by the VR photography metaphor. We are given a starting viewpoint into a scene, but it takes effort on our part to see more.

What more is there to see? I think that’s a very rich thing to explore, but at least includes things like love, beauty, meaning, and purpose. Although these have physical expressions, it has often been the realm of art to explore such immaterial concepts. As such, it takes deliberate effort to understand these topics even a little.

So the metaphor shows us the need to be more open to the immaterial aspects of our world and the fact that it takes deliberate effort to do that. Also, there may be a role for artistic thinking in this process, a topic that I may pick up later.