Mogul Skiing

Skiing moguls is tougher in flat light. Having that type of vision handicap can be a similar issue because it takes two eyes for correct depth perception. Your brain triangulates objects with your eyes to judge depths.

Your brain triangulates objects with your eyes to judge depths.[/quote]

You learn something new every day. I knew both provided debth perception but never heard it decribed this way. Love this forum.

There is another way in which depth is perceived.
Focusing the individual eye, from very close to very distant, is done by using muscles to change the shape of the eye - like using a dial to change the 'shape' of a telescope by making the tube longer or shorter.
People are aware of how much effort they are putting into focusing on an object, and this gives an approximate idea of how far away that object is.
This is nowhere near as accurate as triangulaion, sadly.
I used to be involved with a woman painter who was blind in one eye. She told me quite a lot about her various strategies for compensating, and how it influenced her painting.
Perhaps if no one here has any useful ideas, athletes in another sport might. Cycling for example, or gymnastics.

Folks use pine needles, straw, and sometimes dye to mark the depressions on mogul courses for competitions when the conditions are really not ideal, cloudy, snowing, aka flat light. It might also be worth hitting a 2-3 day bump instruction program like Mogul Logic

No, but you just gave me my next excuse.

A mogul instruction program might be excellent, if it's feasible. One of my sources for info on moguls - which I'm starting to do myself - says to look 4 or 5 bumps ahead, and let your body respond to the bump you're on at the moment, without looking. This might be a good approach for someone with sight in one eye.

The pine boughs, dye, etc used in competition are fine, but they're for experts with sound depth perception. They may not be any use at all in dealing with the problem at hand; lack of depth perception due to loss of sight in one eye.

Remember Fausto Redicee (sp). Italian racer, blind in one eye. Guy was amazing. It was a disadvantage.

I don't know anything else about the topic, but I do wish you success.

Moglus tip that helps me is to focus on sliding down the back of the mogul. Fixating on absorbing the front makes you unprepared for the next turn. Just let your legs respond naturally and think about the turn.

Hey while I am not blind in one eye, due to the positioning of my eyes I also do not have binocular depth perception.

Every one has two forms of depth perception, binocular and monocular. Binocular is the combination of the images you see to get depth and is what everyone has been referring too. Monocular only requires one eye and uses things like if an object obscures another telling which is closer, changes in relative size, things get smaller as they get farther away and convergence things seem to converge on a single point as they move further away towards the horizion. Monocular is what allows artists to give pictures an appearance of depth. Thankfully monocular is still very effective and most people don;t have to much trouble getting by with just it.

I am not very good at moguls cuz I haven't got the technique down but to better allow you to see them try focusing on the tops of the moguls. If you can find the op you know the trough will be to the sides and by shifting your view up you get more background for your brain to use for those monocular techniques. In flat light there is pretty much nothing you can do I have fallen off of 1 foot drops when traversing in flat light and not even known they were there.(well obviously I knew after I fell.)

Btw parking in a close spot is incredibly hard without binocular so those of you who are inpatient in the parking lot just realize that maybe the person can't tell if they are two inches or two feet away when parking their and be more curtiuos.

I think the real question here is, do you feel like your mogul progression is being held back because of your vision problems?

Realistically, I would think the only trouble you might have is looking down the hill several bumps instead of looking at your feet. If you can do this, everything else could come with lessons or hanging out with some good bump skiers, picking up some tips from them.

Go to mogulskiing.net it's the best mogul skiing source of information out there. Hang around the forum there, these guys rock.

OP........Are you the former eastern Examiner Peter Palmer ?

Positioning? Like how? I'm curious.

As for me, I lack what you call binocular depth perception. Actually, I don't know if it 100% but pretty damn close. I have a lazy eye. I can see out of it and it tracks fine but I just don't see out of it at the same time as the other eye. I can see out of either eye, just not both at the same time. Odd. Makes ping pong and baseball insanely hard.

All that being said, I ski the bumps just fine. I've been doing it my whole life. As lonewolf suggested, you/we have monocular depth perception. I would just take a mogul course. I don't remember who said it here on this forum but mogul skiing is probably the one area of skiing that is about 90% skill and 10% gear. It isn't something that comes natural. So, as a fellow shallow person, I put to you that you don't need two eyes to slay the bumps.

YES. That's where I've learned the drills and techniques that I've started using in the bumps; and it's where I saw the advice to let the body do the skiing, while using the eyes to look ahead.
The feet and legs can respond just fine without you looking down, once you learn to let them.

They sure can - like when skiing blower powder on rockhard bumps.

With goggles coated in ice from a snowgun, in flat light, too. You left that out.

Positioning probably wasn't the right word but what I meant is that they way my eyes formed when I look straight ahead one natural looks just above center and one just below. Not enough to effect my ability to use both eyes but enough to prevent binocular vision.

Those pilot qualification tests they made us take like ten times when we got here/to get into USAFA are lots of fun.

"which circle is higher than the rest?"- examiner
"none."-me
"there has to be one."-examiner
"ahh the farthest left one"-me
"You sure?"-examiner(attempt to help me)
"Yeah"-me (not caring)
"Okay. Now which one in this set is higher?"-examiner
"Do we really have to go through this again?"-me

Safe to say I will never be flying any planes.