Crystal ball Claude Alexander, was often billed as "Alexander the Crystal Seer". A crystal ball is essentially a bi-convex spherical lens with a uniform radius of curvature, although without its edges and center material truncated as in a conventional lens construction. Thus the principles of optics may be applied to analyze its imaging characteristics. As a lens, a transparent sphere of any material with refractive index greater than one bends rays of light to a focal point. An image is formed with significant coma, field curvature, and other optical aberrations inherent to spherical lenses. The refractive index of typical materials used for
Parallel projection Parallel projection A parallel projection is a projection of an object in three-dimensional space onto a fixed plane, known as the "projection plane" or "image plane", where the "rays", known as "lines of sight" or "projection lines", are parallel to each other. It is a basic tool in descriptive geometry. The projection is called "orthographic" if the rays are perpendicular (orthogonal) to the image plane, and "oblique" or "skew" if they are not. A parallel projection is a particular case of "projection" in mathematics and "graphical projection" in technical drawing. Parallel projections can be seen as the limit of a