Daff, there's no doubt FOV is important.
In fact, isn't the "zoom" in AH a variable FOV? At least that's what I thought we were doing. When we zoom in, we are narrowing the FOV, gaining detail and sizing more accurately.
I'm quite sure you could go to 1000' in AH and zoom in enough to distinguish numbers as numbers (corresponing to the T-38 example). But you'd give up almost all of a human's normal peripheral vision in doing that.
It would be quite interesting to see at what FOV that occurs. There's some good data on the web about human FOV and Peripheral vision.
Peripheral is REAL important in a game like this. Here's a clip of why I think so:
"The peripheral retinal system is sometimes called the "where" retina. It is involved with the subconscious control of human navigation. It is an old visual system, having evolved long before central visual processing. The evolution of the retina is played out as you go from the extreme edge of the retina (the oldest system in evolution) to the retinal "center", the fovea, where central processing occurs.
The extreme far edges of the retina are purely reflexive. When an object moves on the far retinal edge an immediate reflex swings the eyes in a direction which aligns the moving object with the fovea. Closer in, the peripheral retinal tissue can "see" movement, but there is no object recognition. When movement stops, the object becomes invisible.
Closer in still, the medial peripheral retina monitors optical flow, the velocity of objects moving across the retinal surface. It is this optical flow that is the basis for the subconscious human navigation system, the "where is it" system."
Our problem is when we alter the FOV in the various games, we lose most of the peripheral vision.
I really don't think there's going to be a good solution until we either get half dome projection monitors or really, REALLY good VR goggles.
