CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The term apparent depth is commonly treated in textbooks as an issue easily understandable from the point of view of paraxial optical geometrical optics. Nevertheless, everyday life tells us that most of the time the observation of objects immersed in water is made under a great range of visual angles where the paraxial approximation is not valid. Here we developed a non-paraxial treatment to calculate the position and shape of the image of objects immersed in liquids of different refractive indices. The approach was focused on the parametric positions of the images of a single point at different viewing angles. Then we calculated how the image of an extended object is distorted. By using the Matlab software, it is possible to visualize the images for different geometrical conditions. We also include the analysis for refractive index with negative values as is the case of metamaterials.