thinair Boulder, Colorado. elevation 5400 feet.

SVG illustration of Perspective basics

I finally have something to show for one of my projects. You'll need an SVG plugin. I've tested it with Adobe's SVG Viewer on Mac OS X 10.2.2 using Mozilla 1.2.1 and Explorer 5.2.2. My brother took a look at it with IE 6 on Win32.

Kim originally hired me to illustrate various definitions of terms from the history of perspective. At the time he had an extensive database on the history of perspective including definitions and bibliographic references for primary and secondary sources. But the perspective terms refer to visual elements. Textual definitions are pretty lacking without supporting illustrations. This illustration connects terms to their visual elements. You can click on the parts of the drawing to see their corresponding term. Or you can click the terms to see their corresponding elements. Lastly, I think I made up two of the terms: ground projector and picture projector. I don't remember illustrating those for Kim. But those lines are useful for understanding how the geometry works. I'll illustrate the horizon line and vanishing points later.

The SVG itself includes some CSS and JavaScript. Thanks to J. David Eisenberg for SVG Essentials. Those essentials were just enough for me to get started.