Why do people own wide screens to begin with? Human beings have two eyes, a right and a left. So human eyesight tends to naturally be wider horizontally than it is vertically. Now, we see everything going on in front of us, obviously, but what do we see off to the sides, in our peripheral vision? Things look a bit off, but we can generally see odd movement and other things that we aren't focus on. And while we can live without these things, not being able to see them makes the stuff we do see seem sort of unnatural.

When a person buys a wide screen monitor, they generally do it because the shape of a wide screen more accurately simulates real human vision. And since humans focus on the action in the center of their vision, shouldn't these screens also do so? And this is why the standard accepted idea of widescreen is to take what the user can see in a fullscreen, and add to the sides: because full screens contain all the action, and the extra space is used for peripheral vision. This is the only REAL representation of a human's wide vision.

Why does a game like (unfortunately) Bioshock fail in this? It's simple: Even though it has a widescreen mode, it fails because the width of vision the player has is no wider than it is in standard full screen (between 75 and 90 degrees). So this means that, instead of seeing the action in the middle with extra periphery on the sides, the way a REAL human would, we instead see the action fill the screen. In fact, because Bioshock cuts off visual information from the top and bottom of the screen, we actually see LESS of the action than we normally would anyway. So not only are we cheated out of the periphery (which is the whole point of widescreen to begin with), we are also cheated out of more than 20% of what fullscreen players would see. This creates a feeling of being "zoomed in" to the player that can make him feel completely detached from what he sees, and make a game harder and/or less fun for widescreen users.

I have only dabbled into the widescreen realm using my 26" HDTV to play a few games and my 4:3 CRT monitor to occasionally capture them with Fraps in 16:10.

Thus given the reason for this thread I have to ask one question. Of all the games that offer widescreen resolutions, what percentage would you say have this incorrect FOV problem where cropping rather than actual widening occurs?

Aside from FOV issues I think about it more and more and often wish there were a standardized consumer widescreen ratio much less drastically reduced from letterbox than 16:9 or especially 16:10 is.

Considering letterbox is about 22.5:9, I would think 18:9 would have made a lot more sense for both TVs and monitors. 18:9 would be an easy 2:1 ratio and right in between 16:10 and letterbox.

I am considering an Acer monitor myself, maybe even the 22". Reason being I don't want to spend a lot on one when it looks like LED tech may become popular soon, and hopefully more affordable.

Oh, and yeah, welcome pdusen, just noticed your join date, and nice thread btw. :wink:

As to your question about aspect ratios, I read on a wikipedia article some time ago (which I am having trouble re-locating for confirmation) that 16:10 was supposed to be roughly similar the the actual aspect ratio of human vision (which, if true, is in keeping with my belief that widescreen should have wider FOVs to include peripheral vision.)

Horizontal FOV for both eyes is an approximate ellipse that is 130 degress vertical by 200 degress horizontal.

This means 200:130 = 1.54 which is close to 16:10 = 1.6.
This would be pefect if your nose was touching the screen. As we sit 2 feet away, any one screen is only a small fraction of what we see. So I don't think the human FOV has anything to do with the 16:10 ration we see. I do however think it has everything to do with immersion, as why the widescreen was developed, as why sound was introduced into media, as was why CGI was also introduced. Immersion.

As surface dwellers our visual cognition has evolved to be much more sensative to motion in the horizontal plane so the wider we can go the more deeper we can engage our visual senses. Ideally, we would have a screen that is 200 degress wrapped around our head, and one that is 8 feet tall. Until then, we can wakk a helmet on, or buy TH2G or failing that buy a widescreen which is certainly a fair distance further towards immersion than a standard television standard 5:4 - 4:3.

"It doesn't take a cognitive scientist to see that there is more to our visual perception than is stimulated by staring at a television."

Of course everything you say is true. I was just expressing my belief that, for me, the greatest advantage of high FOVs is the ability to see things to the sides of the screen, out of my central viewing area, that would normally be further out from the center, thereby simulating my peripheral vision, in a way.