Perspective
Research Centre

The Art and Science of Perspective is a major multi-volume series that traces, re-examines and extends the field of visual and optical perspective from antiquity to the digital age. For centuries, perspective occupied a central position in the Western academic tradition as both an art of representation and a science concerned with vision, light, space and the transmission of visual information. The series examines how perspective shapes human vision, spatial understanding, image-making and the representation of reality across art, optics, geometry, architecture, photography, cinema, cartography, scientific imaging and many other fields.

Perspective is far more than a method for drawing receding lines. The series examines both natural perspective—how spatial reality appears to vision—and artificial perspective—how that reality is captured, projected, constructed, transformed and reproduced through images, instruments and media. Its scope extends from painting, architecture and photography to computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotic vision, GIS, photogrammetry, medical imaging, holography, virtual production and other contemporary technologies in which relationships between the observer, object, image and space remain fundamental.

Together, the volumes provide a new interdisciplinary framework for understanding what perspective is, how it operates and why it matters. Perspective Category Theory organises the field systematically across categories, classes, types, forms, phenomena, functions and products, while the Dictionary of Perspective documents more than 4,000 terms and approximately 1,200 types and forms. The series brings together historical terminology, theories, methods, systems, instruments, visual phenomena and applications, resolves conflicting meanings and misconceptions, and develops more than 200 concepts, classifications and distinctions originated, refined or newly formalised by Alan Stuart Radley.