from Hacker News

Why High FOV Sucks – Fixing It with Panini Projection

by Eduard on 2/24/26, 8:27 PM with 13 comments

• by jsheard on 2/24/26, 9:25 PM

  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

• by smusamashah on 2/24/26, 11:02 PM

  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...

• by dima55 on 2/24/26, 9:49 PM

  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

• by shannifin on 2/24/26, 9:20 PM

  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.

• by pyrolistical on 2/24/26, 9:23 PM

  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.

• by kayodehakeem on 2/25/26, 1:06 AM

  Remove