The Perspective Research Centre is a research and educational project dedicated to the study of visual, optical, and technical perspective across art, science, and technology.
We investigate how space is seen, represented, measured, transformed, and understood. Our work brings together material from art history, geometry, optics, visual perception, photography, cinema, architecture, scientific imaging, computer graphics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, and other visual technologies.
The Centre was founded and is directed by Dr Alan Radley FRSA, whose background includes physics, optics, astronomy, imaging systems, visual technology, and the long-term study of perspective. The PRC also preserves and develops important lines of research associated with Professor Kim H. Veltman, whose work on perspective, visual knowledge, Leonardo da Vinci, media theory, and the organisation of knowledge provides a major part of the Centre’s intellectual inheritance.
Our aim is to collect, organise, classify, and develop knowledge about perspective as a broad interdisciplinary field. To support this work, the PRC maintains and develops a growing Library of Perspective, Bibliography of Perspective, Dictionary of Perspective, image resources, study materials, research notes, and educational content.
A central part of our work is the development of Perspective Category Theory, a classification framework designed to organise the many forms, systems, principles, and applications of perspective into a clearer and more coherent structure.
The long-term goal of the Perspective Research Centre is to help establish perspective as a major field of visual knowledge: one that connects the arts, sciences, humanities, design disciplines, and modern visual technologies.