Creating a DirectX Scene - This is not the bug you're looking for

I've been working on my DirectX scene over the past few days, primarily cleaning up my code and making it more object oriented. I created an array of models and render them via a loop now. Unfortunately this revealed what I thought at first was a bug in my code. Let me demonstrate:

At first glance, it appears that the light on each of these models is coming from a slightly different location. However, the same lighting direction is passed to all models. I thought perhaps the way I was transforming the world matrix was somehow affecting my lighting direction as well - I tried different things, pored through the code, and generally fumed ineffectually at the problem for several hours before finally writing to my instructor. Thankfully, he was able to quickly resolve my problem, if in a rather unexpected way.

It turns out the bug was not in the code but in my brain's perception of the scene. Because we have so little information to work with in this scene, and we're trying to interpret a 2D image as a 3D image, our brains actually come to the wrong conclusion. If there were more varied objects in the scene providing perspective, or if we were able to move around the scene, we'd reallize the truth - we aren't seeing all of the spheres from the same angle. The light IS hitting them all from the exact same direction, but our camera is not SEEING them all from the same direction.

The give-away is the texture. If you look closely you'll see the light is hitting the textures all in the exact same way on each sphere. The textures appear rotated differently on each sphere from our perspective, too, but they are all facing the same way, it's simply that we are seeing each from a slightly different angle. In fact, the only part of the light that is actually changing due to where we are in respect to the sphere is the specular highlight, because it's position depends on the camera location in addition to the lighting direction.

My mind was a bit boggled when I understood what my instructor was saying, and I admit I raged a bit at having wasted several hours on what was in fact not a bug. But it is pretty interesting to see first hand how our minds, when presented with a limited amount of information, can easily interpret things into a completely incorrect conclusion.