Effect of Transient Weightlessness on Binocular Depth Perception.

Future space missions may have a requirement for critical distance judgements in performing rendezvous, docking and landing procedures. Since correlation between visual acuity and depth perception is high, depth perception might be adversely affected by transient weightlessness. The experiments reported here were conducted in a zero-G airplane to test the hypothesis, and, although the transitions from 2 G to 0 G and 0 G to 2 G tended to produce adverse effects on depth perception, statistical analysis of the data indicated that the effects were not significant. Figure 1 shows the testing apparatus mounted in the JC-131B airplane.