The Past, Present, and Future of Visual and Optical Perspective

A new understanding of what perspective is, how it operates, and why it matters across the visual arts, sciences and technologies.

The Past, Present and Future of Visual and Optical Perspective traces, re-examines and extends the field of perspective from antiquity to the digital age, revealing how its processes and purposes shape human vision, spatial understanding, image-making and the representation of reality.

Moving across art, science, optics, geometry, architecture, photography, cinema, computer graphics, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, the book examines both natural perspective — how spatial reality appears to vision — and artificial perspective — how it is captured, projected, constructed and reproduced through images, instruments and media.

Through a new Perspective Category Theory, the book moves beyond traditional linear perspective to provide a systematic framework for understanding complex visual and optical phenomena and the connections between perspective, art and science.

The book explores:

• the historical development of perspective
• the relationship between vision, imaging and representation
• natural and artificial forms of perspective
• perspective across traditional and digital media
• present applications and future possibilities
• the wider role of perspective in art, science and technology

Written for artists, architects, photographers, filmmakers, designers, engineers, researchers, students and digital creators, this major interdisciplinary study illuminates the historical development, present applications and future possibilities of visual and optical perspective.