this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Why on earth was it ever Z-up?
Because a flat surface is an x-y plane. The ground is a "flat" surface, and so the z dimension is height.
For me, that's the only way that makes sense. But I program robots for a living, so I'm used to dealing with coordinate systems where the flat reference is the ground. Programmers seem to be using the screen as the flat reference. If I were building a game world, I'd probably use z-up convention.
In screen coordinates, the origin is the top left corner of the screen, and the Y-axis increases towards the bottom of the screen. So Y still isn't "up"
His point is that's where it comes from. In most 3D software as seen in the chart, the XY plane is paralel to the screen, just that Y is up instead of down like in 2D, cut that would be insane if it was like that.