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'It Depends on Your Point of View!' printed from http://nrich.maths.org/
Below are two photographs of the same picture lying on a table, the
first viewed from directly above and the second viewed from an
angle of $45^{\circ}$.

This artistic technique, where an image needs to be viewed from a
particular vantage point to appear as the artist intended, is
called Anamorphosis. The technique is often used at sports venues,
where sponsors' advertisements are created as flat images on the
field of play but from a high camera position the image appears to
stand up.
Pavement artists also exploit this technique - click
here to see an
example of street art, and
here to
see the same picture viewed from the "wrong" angle.
One of the most famous examples of anamorphic art is The
Ambassadors, painted by Holbein in 1533:
In the foreground is a
distorted skull, but when the picture is viewed from the corner,
the skull appears like this:
Your challenge is to come up with a mathematical method for
designing anamorphic images. You will need to choose a vantage
point relative to the image for viewing it correctly.
Once you have decided where the vantage point will be, one way to
create an image is to design something on a grid of squares and
then work out how the grid should be distorted in order to appear
square from your vantage point. The diagrams below might help you
to work this out.
The vertical line represents the grid
as you wish it to appear. The points on the horizontal line show
the distances between the lines on the grid, for a vantage point in
the top right as shown.
This picture helps you to calculate the
widths of the grid once you have worked out the heights
above.
Please send us your pictures of anamorphosis and an explanation of
the maths you used to create them!