Aerial perspective in drawing/painting involves the phenomenon that when a person focuses their eye on one object that is below them (a golf ball when putting or a building when above it in a plane) the other objects around it appear to blur and bend away even if they are on a flat surface like a putting green.
A characteristic of this occurs all the time with vision. Sit in your chair and look at anything in your room---a TV , a book, whatever. Keep staring at it. It will come into sharper and sharper focus. Keep looking at it. Notice how the other things around it--keep focusing on the original object---out of your peripheral vision the objects around it are less and less in focus the further away they are from the object you are focused on. Now, turn your head just a bit like on a swivel, and focus on an object that had been in your peripheral. As that becomes more and more clear while continuing to stare at it, the first object is now the blurred one. Get it? This is why good artists say that photographs are "wrong." They all lie. If I took a photo of your bookshelf, all the books can't possibly be in sharp focus at the same time.....at least the human eye does not see things this way.
Back to Aerial: If you are hovering in a helicopter above the Sears Tower in Chicago, while looking straight down on it would come into sharp focus. While you are still staring at it, the buildings on either side would look less focused or blurred in your peripheral vision.
THE BIG THING ABOUT THIS IN TERMS OF GOLF is not the blurred issue but......
the fact that while you look at the Sears Tower , the street that it is on appears to bend on the left and right, even though the street is flat. Why? because it actually IS further away from you! This is most important to follow: The eye can detect the gradual degrees of distance on either side of the buildings as the street gets further and further away.
Here is how it applies to putting: As I said , I have always noticed since I started golfing that when tour players miss shorties, almost always it is a pull. I did that a lot when I started playing. One day it dawned on me that this is due to the problems of Aerial perspective in drawing. While I am focused on the ball during a short putt, one that is short enough that I can see the hole in my peripheral vision, the true line I should putt on (this is for a straight putt) appears to be not only bending, but bending towards me on my left. I hope this makes sense to you. Again, while looking at the ball, and the ball is now in sharp focus, the true line one should putt on APPEARS to be bending to the left......
(Watching a TV tourney years back, Johnny Miller commented, after Davis Love pulled a short putt that "Most of the time when a tour player misses a short one it is to the left, but I don't know why...." I almost jumped out of my seat. They did not elaborate and just went on with the action at hand.)
.....to continue:
This true line that you want to putt on only APPEARS to be bending....obviously, it really isn't. If someone is aiming for what they believe is "center cut" the ball can still go left and they'll make it. If they think it is half a ball left edge it may still fall in with perfect execution. But.....the big trouble is when it is beyond the half ball and even with good execution they miss. Why? Because they were following a line that existed optically but not in reality. The margin of error on a short putt is actually quite large considering the size of the ball vs. the size of the hole, so many putts go in that were actually miss hit....I've done my share.
As one gets further away from the hole with a longer and longer putt, this phenomenon gets less and less important since the hole is now missing from the peripheral vision.
In the case of Daley's misses on sunday (THREE!) which cost him the tournament and about half-a-million dollars or more, he did the same exact thing everytime. I also believed him to be lined up wrong. You would have to confirm that for me. As a matter of fact, I KNOW he was because he missed three times. Lined up correctly, and following the WRONG line, one of those putts would have fallen since they were so short. He probobly lined up wrong due to Aerial perspective, and then when he executed he was also affected by it and the combination of both cost him the tournament.
Daley is an extremely fast player. Tiger Woods is not and is also a technical kind of player who is also very intelligent anyway. I am not saying Woods knows about Aerial perspective per se, but I will gaurentee that he knows of it's characteristics. He might call the phenomenon something else. Artists call it aeiral perspective or drawing from an "aerial view." Daley is such a fast player who doesn't study the physics of the game a lot so I bet he never came close to understanding this type of thing. Heck, if Johnny Miller didn't figure it out yet, even though he has observed that players missing shorties almost always pull, I don't think Daley will.
I also believe Sergio Garcia is completely confused due to this. Notice his rhythm , set up , etc on putts he's expecting to lag is much more fluid than the shorties. His hanging over the shorties so long is technically problematic but is merely a SYMPTOM of something else. The orgin of this, I would not be surprised about, might simply be this whole area of optics.
Artists have to start with a blank paper or canvas. That print I gave you is an illusion. It is not real. If you ask 100 people what it is everyone will say "A man hitting a golf ball in the fog." They would all be wrong. It is not. It is a bunch of ink on paper. It is a visual "trick" so to speak. I have enough skill that I make the human eye THINK that is a man hitting a golf ball in the fog. In reality it is a bunch of ink on paper. In order for me to pull it off, I had to learn about how color works, anatomy, perspective and lots and lots of things. The better I understood these elements the better I got as a painter. And I am still learning.
Sorry if this seemed long winded but I don't know how to explain it in a short way.
You might google "aerial perspective" or "painting aerial view" for more info.
Again, I heard Michelle Wie is doing excercises to cure her left-eye dominance!
This is ridiculous. Her putting problems have nothing to do with this.
The fact that we have two eyes is what causes all of these difficulties.
Hold your index finger out at arms length. You see one finger. Keep both eyes
open and move it slowly towards the bridge of your nose. It starts to split, right?
Do it with either eye closed. It always stays in focus as one finger , right? A golf ball and putting line would do the same thing. A master painter from Pittsburgh eventually found himself painting with one eye closed because of all of these things. M. Wie should just simply turn her nose ever so slightly right and she'll be OK.....