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Natural perspective : mapping visual space with art and science

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Burleigh_2018_Vision_Naturalperspective_CC.pdf (3.237Mb)
Date
07/05/2018
Author
Burleigh, Alistair
Pepperell, Robert
Ruta, Nicole
Keywords
Art
Visual space
Perspective
Natural perspective
Geometrical perspective
Peripheral visual field
N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
NDAS
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Abstract
Following its discovery in fifteenth-century Italy, linear perspective has often been hailed as the most accurate method of projecting three-dimensional visual space onto a two-dimensional picture plane. However, when we survey the history of European art it is evident that few artists fully complied with its mathematical rules, despite many of them being rigorously trained in its procedures. In this paper, we will consider how artists have actually depicted visual space, and present evidence that images created according to a “natural” perspective (NP) used by artists are judged as better representations of visual space than those created using standard linear (LP) and curvilinear fisheye (FP) projective geometries. In this study, we built a real three-dimensional scene and produced photographs of the scene in three different perspectives (NP, LP and FP). An online experiment in which we asked people to rank the perspectives in order of preference showed a clear preference for NP compared to the FP and LP. In a second experiment, participants were asked to view the real scene and rate each perspective on a range of psychological variables. Results showed that NP was the most preferred and the most effective in depicting the physical space naturally. We discuss the implications of these results and the advantages and limitations of our approach for studying the global metric and geometrical structure of visual space.
Citation
Burleigh , A , Pepperell , R & Ruta , N 2018 , ' Natural perspective : mapping visual space with art and science ' , Vision , vol. 2 , no. 2 , 21 . https://doi.org/10.3390/vision2020021
Publication
Vision
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/vision2020021
ISSN
2411-5150
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/20892

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