Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 230

Trigger Happy

size you would draw the snoozing cat on the garden wall if you traced her outline on the window.

Now usually, any object B that subtends a larger view angle than object A has a correspondingly larger plane projection. This is common artistic sense: it looks bigger, so you draw it bigger. But there are certain cases where view angle and plane projection do not tally. The simplest instance is a drawing of a sphere that is to one side of our vision. It subtends a smaller view angle than a sphere directly in front of us, but it has a larger plane projection. According to true perspective, therefore, it should have an elliptical, not a circular, outline. This is how we see, but it would “look wrong” to draw it thus. (Consider how odd a photograph looks taken with a “fish-eye” lens, even though it represents our field of vision more accurately than standard equipment.) Renaissance painters already knew that these sorts of compromises had to be made. A book on the subject argued that “il ne faut pas dessiner n’y peinder com[m]e l’oeil voit.”35

_________________

35 “One should not draw or paint exactly as the eye sees.” Bosse, TraitÉ des pratiques gÉometrales et perspectives (1665).

230