The mantis shrimp is famous for its eyes. A honeybee sees ultraviolet, a rattlesnake feels heat and a bat hears in echoes. What would they make of your room?
Other EyesYour room, the way a mantis shrimp might meet it.
List a few things around you and pick an animal. Each thing becomes a pair on a picture reel - your eye on the left, the animal's on the right - and you turn the reel to see what changes: a sense you do not have, a thing that vanishes, or just sharper and duller.
1 What is around you
2 The reel
- A sense you lack
- Gone for it
- Sharper
- Duller
3 Retell the reel
One run retells every thing through the animal's senses, for the reader you picked: what you notice, what it probably gets and why, plus one dead-simple picture of how its senses work, a safe one-minute thing to try, and what scientists are still unsure about.
The verdict follows a fixed order: a different world if three or more things reach it through a sense you lack or vanish for it; otherwise a tilted world if one or two do; otherwise mostly familiar.
4 Saved reels
The six sense cards
Rounded popular-science summaries, not measurements. Nobody knows exactly what any animal experiences - these say what its body can pick up.
How the free side works
Each line of your list becomes one pair on the reel. A keyword pass guesses how the animal meets it, in the same order the writer uses: a sense you lack if the line names something that gives off a signal the animal has and people do not (petals and ultraviolet, sky or glass and polarised light, warm bodies and heat, solid things and echoes, deep rumbles and infrasound); otherwise gone if what stands out is something the card says the animal cannot sense at all (red for a honeybee, red or green as colours for a dog, a high sound in the air for a rattlesnake); otherwise sharper for smells, sounds or movement it is keen on; everything else is duller. A written reply is checked against all of it: one pair per thing, the verdict against its own pairs, every extra sense one the animal's card actually lists, and nothing gone for an animal whose card lists nothing it cannot sense.
Other Eyes is a playful explainer for curious people. It is not a field guide, and the retellings are informed guesses about another animal's world.