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.
Yeah, it depends on whether you expect the 2D view to be on the floor or on the wall. If it's on the floor, Z is up. If it's on the wall, Z is forwards & backwards (depth). Personally I think it being on the wall makes way more sense since we already expect from 2D view that Y is up and down, it feels weird to shift it to forwards & backwards when switching to 3D.