Despite the germ of truth in this metaphor it is a mistake to do so, for the environment does not send out messages, and the activity of perception is not one of learning a code or breaking a code. The information about vibratory events, either mechanical or atomic, in the flowing sea of energy surrounding an organism is not transmitted in code. Moreover, and this is what needs to be emphasized, the information that everywhere exists simultaneously in a closed system of reverberating light is still more radically different. The points of which ecological space consists are abstract mathematical fictions. Ecological space is bounded by reflecting surfaces, whereas physical space is unbounded, empty, and transparent.
Ecological optics is in no sense an alternative to physical optics, or a competitor with it.
What it does is provide a better foundation for the psychophysics of perception than physical optics does. But ecological optics promises to yield an explanation of perception , of the direct contact observers seem to have with the world, and of the immediate awareness they have of existing in the world.