Artist Dick Termes paints amazing scenes onto spheres that magically seem to draw you into entire enclosed universes. In Science News, Ivars Peterson profiles Termes and explains the optical illusion behind the art:
"Termes takes a unique perspective in his art. In effect, he imagines crawling inside a transparent ball, then looking out with one eye in all directions from a center point. He then transfers what he sees onto the outside of a sphere.
Suppose, for example, that the ball he's inside is in a starkly geometric, cubical room. The room is defined by three sets of parallel lines. From his perspective inside the ball, these lines lead to six vanishing points. And the lines are curved. This six-point perspective, with the six vertices of an octahedron serving as the vanishing points, becomes the basis of his spherical paintings.
In essence, Termes geometrically translates the view from inside a sphere to the outside of one."
