It's an incredibly calming experience, I've listened to the audiobook over 10 times before sleep. Highly recommended.

I think this is a key point that people are often unaware of. For instance, whenever I see a modern artist who has painted photorealistic art, I read discussion about how amazing it is that this artist can paint something so perfectly life-like, and the Renaissance artists were clearly inferior, since they couldn't paint with such skill.

Besides the obvious discussion about the purpose of art, the other question is whether a photorealistic painting is actually more "lifelike?"

Sure, it represents the world exactly the way that a camera sees it, but does it represent the world exactly as we see it? With our human brains we are filling in details, we are focused on the subject of the painting, we are distorting, we are re-mapping shades of color to what we know they ought to be. "Lens blur" in particular isn't remotely the way our eyes perceive the world: our eyes can never roam around the unfocused parts of our own image, rather we ignore the blurry parts unless we specifically try to notice them, and anything we try to focus on becomes sharp.

So I appreciate the authors recognition that Piranesi's perspective may indeed be closer to how we perceive the world than "correct" perspective.

[0] https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

I wonder what would happen if we'd render videos using it, and maybe games? Could this be a solution to better graphics? Would movement ruin it? Please tell me!

Examples

Panini: https://wiki.panotools.org/File:Ben_Equirectangular_panini.j...

Equirectangular: https://wiki.panotools.org/File:Big_ben_equirectangular.jpg

Full list: https://wiki.panotools.org/Projections

Hmmm

> The mathematics of this is quite simple

If so then surely a program could be written

Unreal Engine has support for it as a post-processing filter[1], but I don't know of any games using it.

[0]: http://tksharpless.net/vedutismo/Pannini/panini.pdf [1]: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

  "Normal homography perspective transformation produced in GIMP. Note how squashed the buildings at the right and left are when taken in isolation"

Here's a problem. The textures have to be put through a perspective projection. As in every pixel.

It's possible to cheat. You can simply use a bicubic stretch or even linear. It really shows up when the polygons are large and they rotate to create deep perspective. You see an artifact whereby the center of the texture does not stay centered on the polygon as it rotates.

https://aaronhertzmann.com/2024/06/10/perspective-distortion...

https://aaronhertzmann.com/2024/09/09/dvc-multiperspective.h...

TIL.

It makes absolute sense, but I never even thought about doing it that way. I was trained as an artist, and I always did perspective the "classic" way. It's entirely possible that this might not work on some subject matter, but it works great on buildings.

> But here is the same elevation drawn using correct rectilinear perspective. I hope you will agree that the Piranesi version is much more legible, the furthest house above is easier to see and the nearest house isn’t horribly distorted as it is below.

The section with this bit has some pictures that really illustrate the effect.I wish there was an easy photoshop way to recreate this

I don't know how to confirm this; the distortion just feels similar to me.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Year_at_Marienbad

Unrelated to perspective: Artists often put more detail in places that you're "supposed to" look at, and leave other things more as a blurry sketch, and our eyes naturally don't linger on those parts. What's interesting to me is that I can often recognize AI art by the way it doesn't make use of this, it tends to make everything equally detailed.

[1]https://bookshop.org/p/books/seeing-like-a-state-how-certain...

> The distinctive feature of Piranesi’s perspective trick is that when you have a series of similar objects receding into the distance, such as houses or arches in a bridge, the nearer versions are just drawn as larger versions of those in the distance

This makes so much sense. When nature presents me with a series of identical arches, that is how I'm going to interpret them. Not as the geometric shapes that are actually projected onto the backs of my eyes.