It is well established that under a wide range of conditions when a sparse collection of texture elements varies smoothly in depth, the spaces between the elements are assigned depth values. This disparity interpolation process has been studied in an effort to define some of its fundamental spatial and temporal constraints. To assess disparity interpolation we employed two tasks: a novel task that relies on the bisection of illusory boundaries created when subjective stereoscopic surfaces intersect, and one that relies on a 3-D shape discrimination. The results of both experiments show that there is no improvement in performance when texture density is increased from near 0.20 to 0.85 or when exposure duration is increased from 50–100 to 1000 ms. This lack of dependence on the addition of features that define the interpolated surface, along with the abrupt decline in performance below a critical value, is consistent with the view that surface interpolation is an important function of human stereoscopic vision.
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