@RasmusP Wow! Remind me not to ask you anything political.
My whole post is basically "realistic fov" vs "that's what you would see in reality".
Distorted distances are not necessarily worse than not seeing enough at all with non-distorted distances.
Going further with this motivation, on a 24" you wouldn't need a lower fov than on a 27". You would need the exact same one, since as long as the monitor is too small to run realistic fov, you would always aim for a projection of how the reality looks, not for no distortions.
However I've said 35° so you don't jump too much and get motion sick either way due to the massive change
Or you could argue like that:
I've found my "non motion sick distortion of reality", I'm talking about how big things are on the monitor at a given distance and fov.
So when you cut off some monitor area (27 to 24), you would cut off some angle of view too. To make it look exactly the same, just with seeing less to the sides on the smaller screen.
That would be 38-44° compared to 42-50°.
For me motion sickness is caused for several reasons:
- non logical movements of the perspective (like look to apex/ahead setting in general)
- unsteady perspective (bumps without filtering or a too low fov)
- the fov is a simulated curved plane. When you look through a fisheye lense you see what I mean, the middle of the screen appears to be too far away from you compared to the sides of the screen. Like someone would have grabbed the center of the image and ran away from you)
The fun thing is: if the fov is too low, although in theory realistic, for me it feels like someone would have grabbed the center of the screen and would shove it into my face. The simulated 3d curvature is too flat.
So I always try to use a fov where the 3d curvature, the "depth" of the image looks natural to me. It's difficult to explain and difficult to spot too!
The funny thing about this is that when the monitor gets smaller, I can run a higher fov without getting motion sick. Not great for racing games but nice for things where you need overview!
I call this "the shove the image into my face" factor which becomes less important the smaller or further away the monitor is!
Anyway, my best anti-motion-sickness fov is a few degrees before I start to spot the fisheye effect to begin. That's the point where it feels good! (where looking at the monitor and looking through the window "feels the same")
When I tried a fov of about 20° and raced for an hour with it and then stood up from my chair, my real eyes felt like fisheye view for a minute. That's when I knew:
Realistic fov nice and fine but it's one of these theoretically great things that are just utter garbage for standard users!
To appreciate the fov theory and calculators you would have to go the other way around:
1. See what distance to your new monitor you would end up with (rig, no rig etc)
2. Think about how much overview you want to have, like an fov of 60 would be nice imo, seeing the left and inside mirror.
3. Calculate what monitor size you would need to make the 60 degrees to be realistic
When you do this you will find out that ultra wide monitors are the perfect single screen solution. But they are expensive