You don’t need a large FOV for movie viewing. Even if it were only 60°, you’d be able see a 2 meter wide screen at a distance of 2 meters (and that’s measuring that distance to the edges of that screen; its center would be about 15% closer)
Suppose your desk is 36" deep. A 48" wide screen at the back of it occupies 41 degrees of your world. The THX recommendation for cinema is 40 degrees. This is as immersive as you're going to get without strapping a screen to your head.
20/20 vision is about 60 pixels per degree, depending on which study you want to believe. 41x60 is 2460 pixels across -- you've already reached the max required pixels with a 3840x2160 display.
Matching the 60° FOV of a 27" monitor at close distance, it's equivalent to 1080p or less. It gets even worse at FOVs equivalent to more reasonable distances.
This makes me think of cinema. Most people who watch films at home watch them on a far smaller screen than they were made for and the picture encompasses a far smaller portion of the field of view. Cinemascope films are supposed to fill almost all of the horizontal field of view. IMAX films are supposed to fill your entire field of view (extending right into the peripheral).
I'm sure many people have tried, like me, to sit closer to the screen so it fills more of your field of view. But even though the angle might be the same, the experience is not. This is true even if you view with one eye. So it makes me think there is something else at play other than just viewing angles.
Actually good point, looking at that article again, 190° is edge-to-edge — i.e. also including single-eye areas.
True binocular FOV is 120° horizontal, which makes it close to a square actually.
It’s not like that remaining 70° is completely useless for monitor viewing, you will still peripherally notice any major display changes in that area, and should you need to turn your head, the partial view makes it easier to quickly find and lock onto the new target.
I've always thought wide screen was strange. Didn't it originally come from projecting from two movie cameras side by side ? It's terrible for closeups in movies. It seems to me the human eye 'viewport' is somewhere around 4:3
When it comes to visual acuity for TV watching, doing calculations while basing yourself on their suggested '20/20 vision'=1/60 of a degree, is probably wrong (on average) :
Put your fingers in front of your face, in the middle of each eye. The glasses would only display the overlay between your fingers. The other half of your vision (and it is a hard cut off as you move your head) does not get the overlay. That would be roughly 90 degrees, which puts 60 and 30 in perspective.
Say we have 1,000 pixels. With current lenses we can display 500 of those pixels over 30 degrees of vision. This is the tradeoff between FOV and Resolution. You could also display those 500 pixels over 60 degrees of vision at half the resolution. A better lens increases the maximum resolution, so you can show 500 pixels over 15 degrees of vision. But you're still going to bottleneck on the total number of pixels you can display. And if you're targetting FOV having higher resolution only hurts because it costs more of your total pixel budget for less of the users vision being full.
> That should place the headset’s pixels per degree around 50 to 70 PPD.
> “The resolution of the fovea, the highest resolution portion of the eye, is considered to be 60 pixels per degree. And if you have a display like 60 pixels per degree, probably like 99.9 percent of people wouldn’t perceive the pixels”
As a comparison, Quest 2 has a resolution of 20 PPD and sitting in front of a 27" 4K monitor on a desk leads to about 70 PPD.
Yes, I've measured my eyes' resolution to be about 60 pixels per degree. I made a black-and-white grid and set it as my desktop picture, with a one-to-one magnification. Then I backed away until I could not discern the pixels. There's even a moire effect, like with cameras, as I reached my threshold. Then I used trigonometry to calculate my angle of view.
Most living-room TVs are probably placed at a 15- to 25-degree angle of view. 1920x1080 is enough for up to a 32-degree horizontal angle of view, which is 7 feet away from a TV with a 55" diagonal, for example. I will say, however, that movie theaters look a little better with 4K, since 30 degrees is supposed to be the back row, and the front row might be 60 or so.
Absolutely. The device is an Epson Moverio. I see through a quick search that the FoV should be 23°. And mind you, in some conditions the characters at the borders can lose focus or gain artefacts.
The display could sure gain from extra lines (a resolution of 1280x960, instead of 1280x720, could be optimal to my estimation) without causing visual issues, but potential visual issues with the left and right extremes are already evident.
> a whopping 60 degrees which is considered high for just consuming content, much less playing a game where you're expected to see everything happening on screen and react to it.
Consider that the game is probably rendering at least 90 degrees to squish down into that 60.
Personally I sit back for content but I love to sit close for games, with the FOV set to max. The really important stuff fits in the middle of the screen, and outside of the middle I get near-peripheral vision instead of bezel and wall.
50 inch high? Do you mean wide? Due to our physiology of two horizontal eyes, we're more suited for a wide screen than one that high. I'm not convinced your field of view could even s make use of an entire 50 inch high screen at that distance.
If the FoV is less then it drives home that the pixel per degree is even higher!
This is a closed face VR headset with presumably more traditional screens and lenses and unlike a Hololens or MagicLeap. The device sounds closer to VR headsets like the Vive and Quest, which are mostly around 90-110 degrees.
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