From: arthur@cs.unc.edu (Kevin Arthur) Subject: Re: DESIGN: FOV Reference Date: 15 Jan 1996 12:02:39 -0500 Organization: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In article <4cu9oh$3rm@nntp5.u.washington.edu>, ROY RUDDLE wrote: > >I know that the 'normal' FOV used in visualisation + simulation >applications, which are displayed on a single monitor, is 45-50 >deg. Can anyone anyone give me a reference which explains/demonstrates >why this FOV is a good, general purpose compromise (eg. an experiment >which compares users' perceptions of the distortion of the same object >when displayed on a monitor and the real world?) Kubovy (ref. below) writes about distortion being apparent when the geometric field of view used to create a static image is larger than about 45 degrees. I don't recall whether he cites any specific studies that answer your question directly, but it's probably a good place to start. Kubovy, Michael. The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. The following describe recent studies related to some aspects of FOV in workstation-based display, and may or may not be relevant depending on your application... Barfield, Woodrow, Rafael Lim, and Craig Rosenberg. Visual enhancements and geometric field of view as factors in the design of a three-dimensional perspective display. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society, pp. 1470--1473, 1990. McGreevy, M.W. and S.R. Ellis. The effect of perspective geometry on judged spatial information instruments. Human Factors, Vol. 28, pp. 439--456, 1986. Psotka, Joseph, and Sonya A. Lewis. Effects of Field of View on Judgements of Self-Location. Available at http://198.97.199.6/fovtr.html. 1995. (see also http://alex-immersion.army.mil/vr.html) For a longer list of references on FOV issues (geared more towards HMD's) look at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~arthur/pubs/fov-bib/fov-bib.html Kevin -- Kevin Arthur Department of Computer Science http://www.cs.unc.edu/~arthur/ UNC Chapel Hill