Scenes · Study 081
Night Train
Look out of a night train window as hills, lit farmhouses and telegraph poles slide by at different speeds under a low moon.
What you're looking at
Everything outside the glass scrolls right to left, and the speed depends on distance. The moon barely moves, far hills crawl, near hills hurry, and the trackside poles whip past with their wires rising and dipping between them. The frame, the sill and a faint reflection of the carriage light stay still.
The idea behind it
This is motion parallax, one of the strongest depth cues the visual system has, and the reason the countryside seen from a train feels so three dimensional. Objects nearer than the point you are looking at appear to race backward, while distant ones seem to travel along with you.
Try this
Move the pointer right to speed the train up, or left to slow it to a crawl.
