Trigger Happy
mathematical method for what became known as “scientific perspective.”
You know it already. Objects in the distance decrease in apparent size according to strictly defined ratios. Parallel lines converge at one or more “vanishing points.”27 Scientific perspective is universally familiar today, at least in the West. It is everywhere, and it just looks “right.” When a child is taught to draw railway lines converging as they roll into the distance, she is learning scientific perspective. We are familiar with Escher’s unsettling distortions of it. And scientific perspective is the kind on which most modern 3D videogames are constructed. In games such as Doom, where the screen supposedly shows the player’s point of view in an imagined, putatively solid environment, the computer
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27 This familiar term was not, in fact, coined (by Brook Taylor, in Linear Perspective) until nearly 300 years after the discovery of scientific perspective by painters.2
