Imagine you are taking a picture with your camera

• Objects in the room may be best described in a local coordinate system unique to each object
• They also have position and orientation in the world
• Your camera also has a position and orientation, which determines where it is looking
• Your camera has settings, such as size, field of view, and resolution, which help define how the final picture is rendered

The synthetic camera model used in computer graphics mimics this process, using transformations between different coordinate systems to render an image.  These transformations are implemented using matrices.

High