Football pitch sponsor logos appear flat and perfectly proportioned on TV, but walk onto the pitch and they're massively stretched and distorted. How is this illusion created mathematically?
Next time you watch a football match, look at the sponsor logos painted on the pitch. On screen they look perfectly normal — flat rectangles with clean text. But in reality, those logos are wildly stretched and skewed on the grass. This is anamorphic projection: the logo is pre-distorted so that when viewed from the main camera angle, perspective compression makes it appear flat. This exploration investigates how transformation matrices can model the relationship between the 'true' logo shape and the distorted version painted on the pitch. Students will explore how camera position, viewing angle, and pitch geometry determine the transformation needed.