Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 203)

Trigger Happy
205
mathematical method for what became known as
“scientific perspective.”
You know it already. Objects in the distance
decrease in apparent size according to strictly defined
ratios. Parallel lines converge at one or more
“vanishing points.”
27
Scientific perspective is
universally familiar today, at least in the West. It is
everywhere, and it just looks “right.” When a child is
taught to draw railway lines converging as they roll into
the distance, she is learning scientific perspective. We
are familiar with Escher’s unsettling distortions of it.
And scientific perspective is the kind on which most
modern 3D videogames are constructed. In games such
as Doom, where the screen supposedly shows the
player’s point of view in an imagined, putatively solid
environment, the computer calculates—precisely
according to the rules first devised by Brunelleschi and,
later, elaborated by Alberti in his On Painting (1436)—
the appropriate size and shape for all objects on the
screen, depending on their distance from and angle to
the hypothetical “viewer.”
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27 This familiar term was not, in fact, coined (by Brook Taylor, in Linear
Perspective) until nearly 300 years after the discovery of scientific
perspective by painters.2