Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervades industry, entertainment, transportation, finance, and health. It seems to be in a kind of golden age, but today AI is based on the strength of techniques that bear little relation to the thought mechanism. Contemporary techniques of machine learning, deep learning and case-based reasoning seem to be occupied with delivering functional and optimized solutions, leaving aside the core reasons of why such solutions work. This paper, in turn, proposes a theoretical study of perception, a key issue for knowledge acquisition and intelligence construction. Its main concern is the formal representation of a perceived phenomenon by a casual observer and its relationship with machine intelligence. This work is based on recently proposed geometric theory, and represents an approach that is able to describe the inuence of scope, development paradigms, matching process and ground truth on phenomenon perception. As a result, it enumerates the perception variables and describes the implications for AI.