Why High FOV Sucks – Fixing It with Panini Projection

jsheard 82 days ago |

Unreal supports Panini out of the box, but very few games seem to use it or any other alternative projection.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...

HYPER DEMON may be the best known and most extreme exception, it renders 180 degrees in front of you, then renders 180 degrees behind you as a red-tinted overlay, giving full 360 degree awareness if you can wrap your brain around it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScglDSi9KUs

zokier 82 days ago | |

Weird that UE also implements this as purely postprocessing filter. Surely there is more efficient way to render directly using panini projection, or at least something closer to it? Could you do it in vertex shader or something

jsheard 82 days ago | | |

You can kinda do it in the vertex shader, but the geometry would have to be very finely tessellated for the curve to look right since each individual triangle would still have straight edges. Alternatively you could raytrace the camera instead, which makes it trivial to use any projection, but that's a non-trivial departure from how most engines work. Post-process is the least intrusive way to do it.

I'm not sure what HYPER DEMON does, it's built on a custom engine so they could really specialize into the crazy FOV if they wanted to.

projectionguy 81 days ago | | |

Can also be done in fragment shader with up to six 90 degree cameras. For a fast-paced game doing it in vertex shader is probably fine. I’m not sure what HyperDemon does.

zokier 81 days ago | | |

I was also thinking that maybe you could render the center part of image in higher res than outside edges. So that when you apply the projection filter it's less of a problem.

smusamashah 82 days ago |

There is also FOVO Dynamic Projection which claims projection like human vision. They have videos showing the projection in action in games https://www.fovotec.com/gaming

https://www.fovotec.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26795290

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/fovo-a-new-3d-rendering...

dima55 82 days ago |

I would love for us to move past the idea that non-pinhole projections have "distortion", and we should strive to remove this "distortion" by reprojecting stuff to pinhole models. In practice, ALL projections distort straight lines and/or shapes and/or sizes, so if you use the pinhole projection everywhere, your images look like crap (see iphone wide-lens camera output for instance). Most of the normal non-pinhole projection functions work fine for wide lenses, while behaving like a pinhole lens with long lenses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens#Mapping_function

shannifin 82 days ago |

Nice! I wanted to do this sort of thing when I was playing around with 3D game programming in the late 90s / early 2000s, to capture how a wider FOV looks in movies. Alas, computers were too slow and I was too inexperienced anyway.

pyrolistical 82 days ago |

I find it funny people play on the highest fov in first person shooters to their own detriment.

They think the higher fov is a pure win as it allows them to see more but in reality it is a tradeoff making targets in front of them smaller.

mhitza 82 days ago | |

Part of the reason why I don't play many, if at all, modern FPS. Claustrophobic, disorienting, small FOV are something I cannot get used to.

musicale 82 days ago | | |

I was fine playing Splatoon and Borderlands (and some other FPS and TPS) but somehow Overwatch made me ill for weeks.

5G_activated 82 days ago | |

there is a long standing problem in Team Fortress 2 where the default FOV is 75, as it was on the console ports of the Orange Box, and it's believed to turn off a lot of new players and enrage regulars because they just don't see things in the periphery that everyone else playing at the maximum FOV of 90 does.

kayodehakeem 82 days ago |

Remove