[HN Gopher] Why High FOV Sucks - Fixing It with Panini Projection
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Why High FOV Sucks - Fixing It with Panini Projection
Author : Eduard
Score : 34 points
Date : 2026-02-24 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| shannifin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 5G_activated wrote:
| 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.
| mhitza wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You could _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 actually built on a
| custom engine so they could really specialize into the crazy
| FOV if they wanted to.
| dima55 wrote:
| 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
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(page generated 2026-02-24 23:01 UTC)