I went to an exhibit in the Tulsa Zoo that had a little area that supposedly shows how a common house fly sees the world, in a hexagonal pattern. How do we know that is how they see?
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We do not know how the experience the world. What we do know is how their eyes work.
The have [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_eye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_eye) and to quote the article
>A compound eye is a visual organ found in arthropods such as insects and crustaceans. It may consist of thousands of ommatidia,[1] which are tiny independent photoreception units that consist of a cornea, lens, and photoreceptor cells which distinguish brightness and color. The image perceived by this arthropod eye is a combination of inputs from the numerous ommatidia, which are oriented to point in slightly different directions. Compared with single-aperture eyes, compound eyes have poor image resolution; however, they possess a very large view angle and the ability to detect fast movement and, in some cases, the polarization of light.[2]
If you look at the lens they are not round but mostly hexagons and sometimes less-sided [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Krilleyekils.jpg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Krilleyekils.jpg)
So the hexagon pattern with single colors per hexagon is a way to try to show us what they see. The low resolution is something we know their vision havs, and that is a major part of what the display tries to show. It is not perfect and has the limitation of our eye so can’t show the advantage of the compound eye.
I would expect from the point of view of a fly they do not see a large single-color block but instead, their whole vision has a lower resolution. But that is a very hard thing to illustrate to us in another way.
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