Abstract
Following its discovery in fifteenth-century Italy, linear perspective has often been hailed as the most accurate method of projecting three-dimensional visual space onto a two-dimensional picture plane. However, when we survey the history of European art it is evident that few artists fully complied with its mathematical rules, despite many of them being rigorously trained in its procedures. In this paper, we will consider how artists have actually depicted visual space, and present evidence that images created according to a “natural” perspective (NP) used by artists are judged as better representations of visual space than those created using standard linear (LP) and curvilinear fisheye (FP) projective geometries. In this study, we built a real three-dimensional scene and produced photographs of the scene in three different perspectives (NP, LP and FP). An online experiment in which we asked people to rank the perspectives in order of preference showed a clear preference for NP compared to the FP and LP. In a second experiment, participants were asked to view the real scene and rate each perspective on a range of psychological variables. Results showed that NP was the most preferred and the most effective in depicting the physical space naturally. We discuss the implications of these results and the advantages and limitations of our approach for studying the global metric and geometrical structure of visual space.
Highlights
If visual sensation is “how we see the world” visual space is how we perceive its spatial properties such as object size, shape, and location, that is, its geometrical structure
Descriptive statistics showed that 43.24% of participants assigned the Natural Photograph (NP) to the first position, followed by the Fisheye Photograph (FP) (36.49%) and the Linear Photograph (LP) (20.27%); 50% of participants assigned the LP to the third position, meaning that half of the time participants choose LP as their least favorite photograph
Post hoc tests using the Bonferroni correction revealed that the mean rating obtained by the NP (M = 4.09, SD = ±1.51) was statistically significantly higher compared to the ones obtained by the FP (M = 3.11, SD = ±1.29; p < 0.025) and the LP (M = 3.04, SD = ±1.55; p < 0.025)
Summary
If visual sensation is “how we see the world” visual space is how we perceive its spatial properties such as object size, shape, and location, that is, its geometrical structure. Artists have been faced with the practical problem of how to convey visual experience in a way that is perceptually convincing and aesthetically satisfying to their audience. They frequently have little control over how their images will be viewed, under what lighting conditions and from which positions or distances. Despite these practical constraints artists have been highly successful in creating images of visual space that are compelling, informative, and memorable, and artworks consistently rank among the most valued objects in our society, both financially and culturally [5]
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