When using a camera to act as a person viewing a scene, it seems like setting the FOV to a human’s Field of view is a logical thing to do.
However, after reading (and looking) it seems like humans have an almost 180 degree field of view.
If you use that value as a parameter in the FOV, you see impossible results. I made an example file that show with a FOV of greater than about 170, impossible things happen (like seeing behind you).
What is a good setting to use to emulate a human’s FOV?
fov_test.toe (7.32 KB)
Yes, humans have a very large FOV, but the issue is that screens and projections only take up a portion of that.
Rather than think about calculating FOV, it’s easier to build a 3D model of the world in real-world coordinates and then place a virtual “human” camera in the world. Touch Designer doesn’t make you calculate FOV in this case. The technique is covered in this series:
Steve Mason’s CineChamber Perspective Pre-viz (derivative.ca/Events/2012/MUTEKWorkshop/)
I haven’t tried dome projections, but I think they use the same concept.
Standard cameras heavily distort after 120 degrees because of the planar sensor configuration in both physical and virtual cameras whereas the human eye is more sophisticated and receives an elongated hemispherical image. Bergi’s cube map dome file will get you very close to a human visual perception experience. Of course it’s designed to be viewed in a dome to ‘see’ the effect! In reality we see no straight lines only curvature arching towards and away from us, there is no such thing as a straight line to the eye, our inbuilt visual processing system ‘corrects’ our interpretation of the world with standard cameras imitating this effect.