Orthographic media

Working on var­ious projects over the years, I’ve often had reason to tinker with 3D graphics ren­dered using an ortho­graphic pro­jec­tion.

Most first-person 3D games use a per­spec­tive pro­jec­tion, which appears gen­er­ally “realistic”: objects shrink as they become more dis­tant. When vir­tual scenes are ren­dered this way, we (as humans, with eyeballs) can use our visual intu­itions to judge the scale and arrange­ment of objects within them. That’s the case even when a scene is very abstract, like this one:

I could point to any two cubes in the scene above, ask “which one is closer?” and you’d be able to tell me, instantly and confidently.

There’s another kind of pro­jec­tion, called ortho­graphic, often used in 3D appli­ca­tions where you want the view to be dia­gram­matic rather than dramatic. (It’s very common in strategy games.) In this pro­jec­tion, objects appear the same size regard­less of their dis­tance from the camera. Here’s that same scene—it’s lit­er­ally the same data structure—ren­dered ortho­graphically:

I could point to any two cubes in the scene above, ask “which one is closer?” and you’d have to pause to figure it out. It’s not impossible;