Forced Perspective

The fascination for some things never fades away. Considering humanity as a whole, the fascination for representation and expression of ourselves though "forced perspective" has been one of many such things. The earliest records of this can be found during the Roman Era when technology was limited. The interior of Roman Emperor Constantine's Aula Palatina palace is one of the examples, built in around 300 A.D. Its mystery is unraveled later in the article. In addition, forced perspective photography in which objects that are far from us are smaller relative to the ones that are closer.

Forced perspective is one of the methods used to create optical illusion. It exists because of an almost a defect to working of human visual system. Human mind has a natural desire to interpret any 2-D drawing or picture as a projection of  a 3-D object in a plane. Our visual perception processes information about objects we see on the basis of light received from them. So, objects that are far from our eyes are smaller relative to the ones that are closer. But when the information given to our eyes is limited by forcing it to process information based on a single perspective, looking at different parts of the object makes us reconsider the 3-D nature of the object, which confuses the mind. Thus, an optical illusion is created by the method of forced perspective. This can be clarified from the example of Penrose triangle shown below.

Fig: A Penrose Triangle

A penrose triangle has its every 3rd side situated at an angle to the plane containing any 2 of its sides. By forcing us to interpret the information about the triangle only from one perspective , it makes us realize the impossibility of such a structure to exist.

There are many interesting applications in both contemporary and modern culture. Architectural accomplishments, ranging from times of Roman era to the present that has been adopting this method to surpass limits of creation to create 'Impossible Architecture'.
Constantine's palace is one of such examples where the length of the palace is magnified by optical illusion, giving an impression of the palace being much longer than it actually is, when seen from the entrance.

In recent times, forced perspective has found applications in Film making, Photography, Videography and more recently typography and gaming.
In Filmmaking, forced perspective techniques have been widely used ranging from low-budget B movies to Mega budget movies like the Lord of the Rings series, Harry Potter series, Inception, etc. A lot of this was used in the Lord of the Rings to make characters like Grandalf, a giant and like Frodo and Bilbo, dwarfs when in reality their height differs only by 5 inches. Similar dwarf-giant technique has been used in Harry Potter. Forced perspective techniques have also been widely used and experimented in photography and videography. In a music video, "The writings on the Wall" by a rock band, OK Go, multiple instances of this technique has been used. This is also widely being adopted as a presentation technique for the unique view/perspective about things.