The Camera - Essentials of Interactive Computer Graphics - page 361

14
The Camera
This chapter discusses the concepts behind an abstract computer graphics camera.
This chapter:
• analyzes the technical requirements of a computer graphics camera;
• explains the perspective and orthonormal visible volumes;
• presents the eye coordinate (EC) and 3D normalized device coordinate
(NDC) spaces;
• describes the 3D NDC-to-2D device coordinate space projection.
After this chapter we should:
• understand that computer graphics represents the camera with the VIEW ma-
trix;
• understand the transformation operations defined in the VIEW and the PROJ
ECTION matrix processors.
This chapter does not include any hands-on implementations. Chapter 15 presents
the implementation of the abstract concepts learned in this chapter. All objects we
have worked with are abstract. For example, the squares in Figure 13.7 are defined
by a few lines of code. As we have seen we can define a PrimitiveSquare class
to represent the abstract idea of a square. Compared to a few lines of code, the
PrimitiveSquare class would be easier to work with because it allows us to
program with the characteristics of a square (e.g., size, color).
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