NewTime wrote:
I remember someone saying that if we actually saw in 3D, we'd be able to see all sides of objects.
From an image processing perspective, we do indeed see in 3D, not 2D as your friend surmises.
A linescan camera sees in 1D. If you were to show it a square, it would only see a line.
A regular camera sees in 2D. If you showed it a square, it would see the square. If you showed it a cube, it would see a representation of a cube mapped to a 2D shape. People observe a similar phenomena when they see with only one eye.
Your two eyes together, however, see 3D. While the image from both eyes is 2D, additional information is derived from the slight differences in perspective from each eye, and that is used by the brain to reconstruct the image of the 3D object.
The visual processing abilities of the brain are impressive. In fact cannot even emulate the visual processing abilities of simple brains with our modern computers. Consider that most birds and prey animals do not have binocular vision, yet are still able to construct 3D images by looking at the image with each eye.