The Mapping of Space: Perspective, Radar, and 3-D Computer Graphics
Excerpt:
This essay discusses twentieth century automation of what can be called visual nominalism - the use of vision to capture the identity of individual objects and spaces by recording distances and shapes. The automation of this function of vision has started well before the century with the development of various perspectival techniques and technologies: perspective machines, descriptive and perspective geometry, and photography. But only digital computers made possible mass automation in general, including the automation of visual nominalism.