viewerdependent

Viewerdependent is an adjective used primarily in perception, vision science, and related disciplines to describe properties, effects, or judgments whose appearance or interpretation changes with the observer. A stimulus is viewerdependent when different viewers (or the same viewer in different conditions) report different percepts for the same physical input. The effect arises from the interaction between sensory input and observer-specific factors such as viewing angle, distance, illumination, prior experience, and individual variations in vision.

Common examples include ambiguous figures, where the percept flips between interpretations depending on the viewer; size and depth judgments that change with distance or angle; color appearance that varies with illumination and observer’s color vision, leading to phenomena such as metamerism and color constancy limits; and holographic or stereo displays, where the perceived image depends on the viewer’s position.

In applied fields such as computer graphics and visualization, viewerdependent techniques render or annotate content differently based on the viewer’s location or viewpoint, for example through viewerdependent texture mapping, shading, or level-of-detail decisions.

Viewerdependence is contrasted with viewer-independence, where perceptual judgments or physical measurements are invariant across observers and conditions. In scholarly usage, recognizing viewerdependence helps explain why perceptual data can vary between individuals and contexts, and it informs the design of experiments, interfaces, and rendering systems to accommodate or exploit subjectivity.