Might seem a daft question but it just hit me that it could mean one of two things.
It could mean:
1) The field of view of when your eyes are just looking straight ahead and not moving at all. If I just look straight ahead and don’t move my eyes this FOV seems to be about 180degrees.
2) The field of view of when your head is perfectly still, but you are allowed to move your eyes to lateral extremes i.e. the maximum possible field of view you can have just by moving your eyes around, if your head is perfectly still In this case my FOV is something like 230 or something.
I’m pretty sure when people talk about FOV they’re talking about #1 but I just wanted to check because natural FOV is allegedly 220-240 or so… and this is my FOV only if I am moving my eyes within my head… so is this what it means? If so there is something wrong with my head. If not, and people mean it’s number 2 then that’s pretty awesome because a 170 FOV VR headset like PImax means if you’re looking straight ahead you pretty much can’t see any edge at all!
EDIT: wow… on some researchign it it seems it’s actually #2 ??? In which case the large FOV setting of the Pimax pretty much takes up the entire natural FOV if you just look straight ahead??? If so this is frikking insane and my excitement for PImax will reach jizz-levels!!!
Actually, when looking straight ahead without moving eyes, your FOV is ~220° (or at least mine is). Note that you can’t fully see something at the limits, but you CAN see motion and general shapes. Hold your hands at eye-level, as far back as you can. Looking straight ahead, wiggle your hands while moving them forward. You’ll be surprised where they become visible.
I worked in neuroscience and am currently studying neurology so would just like to say that the test you described is biased and wouldn’t be used in a clinical setting , as the brain can trick yourself into detecting motion that you know is there even when it doesn’t fall into your peripheral vision.
Although some sources quote ~210 degrees in the human field of view (Wikipedia being one), this can be misleading.
The monocular vision of each eye extends to about 160 degrees without any temporal rotation of the eyeball. Monocular vision matches the description of what you described - where you can see vague movement and colour but no depth perception.
Using this approximation our full field of vision with fixed forward gaze is more like 190 degrees. If a VR headset can achieve a 200 degree horizontal FOV, theoretically you will not see any edges at all when you’re looking straight ahead.
