About: Ambient optic array

The ambient optic array is the structured arrangement of light with respect to a point of observation. American psychologist James J. Gibson posited the existence of the ambient optic array as a central part of his ecological approach to optics. For Gibson, perception is a bottom-up process, whereby the agent accesses information about the environment directly from invariant structures in the ambient optic array, rather than recovering it by means of complex cognitive processes. More controversially, Gibson claimed that agents can also directly pick-up the various affordances of the environment, or opportunities for the observer to act in the environment, from the ambient optic array.