The Perspective Research Centre studies perspective as a wide interdisciplinary subject connecting art, science, technology, vision, and spatial representation.
Perspective is one of the fundamental ways in which human beings see, represent, measure, interpret, and understand spatial reality.
It is often introduced as a drawing method, especially as the linear perspective of Renaissance art. But perspective is much broader than this. It includes visual perception, optics, projection, geometry, image-making, instruments, photography, cinema, scientific imaging, computer graphics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and many other fields.
Explore the Subject
This site introduces the many worlds of perspective: its history, categories, methods, instruments, applications, theories, and future possibilities.
It is intended for artists, researchers, teachers, students, designers, photographers, filmmakers, architects, historians, scientists, technologists, CGI specialists, VR/AR developers, AI image researchers, and anyone interested in the deeper structure of visual experience.
Perspective is not a dead subject. It remains central to how we see, make images, model space, and understand the visual world.
Why Perspective Matters
Perspective is central to how we understand the three-dimensional world.
Whenever we look at a scene, draw a picture, take a photograph, design a building, read a map, use a microscope, create a film, model a virtual world, or interpret an image from a scientific instrument, we are dealing with perspective in some form.
Perspective helps us organise spatial information. It allows us to represent depth, scale, distance, shape, viewpoint, movement, and spatial relationships. It also helps us understand the limits and distortions that occur whenever reality is seen, projected, imaged, measured, or transformed.
A Fragmented Subject
Although perspective has been studied for centuries, it has often been divided between different disciplines.
In art, it has been treated as a method of drawing. In geometry, it has been studied through projection and spatial construction. In optics, it has been linked to light, lenses, and image formation. In architecture, engineering, photography, cinema, computer graphics, and scientific imaging, it appears as a practical tool for representing or analysing space.
Because of this, perspective has rarely been treated as a unified subject in its own right.
The PRC aims to bring these separated areas together. Its purpose is to collect, organise, classify, and develop knowledge about the many forms, systems, principles, instruments, phenomena, and applications of perspective.
Towards a Science of Perspective
A central aim of the Perspective Research Centre is to support the development of perspective science.
By this we mean a broad field concerned with how spatial reality is seen, represented, measured, transformed, and understood. This field includes visual perspective, optical perspective, technical perspective, natural perspective, artificial perspective, simulated perspective, and many other forms.
The PRC is developing Perspective Category Theory as a framework for organising this large and complex subject. This framework helps classify the many types, forms, systems, principles, methods, instruments, products, functions, and applications of perspective.
Key Problems of Perspective
Perspective raises several fundamental problems.
These include the problem of space, the problem of scale, the problem of resolution, the problem of time, the problem of viewpoint, and the problem of reality.
How do we represent invisible space? How does scale affect apparent shape and measured size? At what point do forms, lines, objects, or details vanish — either geometrically through projection, or optically through the limits of visual resolution? How do images represent change over time? How do different viewpoints relate to one another? How accurately can a perspective image correspond to physical reality?
These problems show why perspective is not merely a historical drawing technique. It is a deep subject with continuing importance across art, science, technology, and visual culture.
The Work of the PRC
The Perspective Research Centre brings together books, articles, images, diagrams, films, bibliographies, archives, definitions, classifications, and research notes relating to perspective.
Its resources include the Library of Perspective, the Bibliography of Perspective, the Dictionary of Perspective, the developing Encyclopedia of Perspective, and the book series The Art and Science of Perspective.
Together, these resources aim to make the field of perspective easier to study, teach, compare, and develop.