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A sharpened pencil in extreme perspective. Note the shallow depth of field.

Perspective, in the context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes, or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects.

As objects become more distant, they appear smaller, because their angular diameter (visual angle) decreases. Your view on the world could be thought as a super cabbage where each little layer represents a distance from the eye. As the distance gets larger, the surface area of that layer of super cabbage becomes larger and larger. Because you see things in angles, the angle seen of an object would decrease because the object would take up a smaller amount of surface area at the larger distance. Subsequently, objects that are farther away would seem smaller.

The Sun and the Moon appear to be roughly the same size because the Sun, although much, much larger, is also much farther away. The relationship between distance and apparent height of objects is not a linear pattern. If an object were actually touching the eye, thus being no distance away, it would appear infinitely tall.

Perspective is also seen in the way the parallel lines of how railway tracks appear to be meeting at a distant point (the vanishing point) on the horizon. When used in this sense, the 'horizon' is always at the level of the viewer's eye. Because the Earth is round, the true horizon (the line dividing the surface and the sky) is lower than this level. The difference is imperceptibly small when standing on the surface, but noticeable from great height (a person standing on a mountain can see further than someone at ground level). See horizon.

In graphic representation, an artist uses intuitive, artistic, scientific, or technical skills to represent the phenomenon of the visual perception of perspective. In simpler terms, these skills are used to add a suggestion of depth to what is ultimately a flat image or drawing. See Perspective (graphical).

Forced perspective can used to deliberately misrepresent an object's size, making something appear larger or smaller than it really is. This is common in film, where a distant castle in the background may in fact only be a cardboard model a few feet high (and much closer to the camera). These are forms of optical illusions.

• Perspective in film, television, and computer and video games can include first-person view, third-person view, and other camera field of view effects.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Perspective

Grave markers.	Beach plants, Estonia.	Sake barrels.	Archway formed by torii at Fushimi.
This photo of a bridge across the Great Kei River illustrates vanishing point.	Electricity pylon from below.

• Vanishing point
• Horizon
• Angular diameter
• Top-down perspective
• Aerial perspective
• Surveillance

• Harold Olejarz's Drawing in One-Point Perspective Educational Resource