“I found the rendering oddly unusual as well,” Tom Davis, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, tells CNN. “After looking a bit more closely, I think I find the unsettling nature an interesting combination of the artistic perspective chosen and post-pandemic personal space/social distance training that’s been drilled into all of us.”
Davis says the fact that this is a rendering, not an actual photograph, plays a crucial role. “It almost gives the impression of a short, over-tall, stacked vessel that is on choppy seas, but in reality this may be a trick of perspective, as the actual vessel is apparently three to four times longer than the idea I get by looking downward at the rendering. The images I’ve seen that are more in profile add a more reasonable, I think, sense of the height in context to the overall length.”
