Why is the “peripheral vision” of wide field of vision footage curved but irl peripheral vision is normal?
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> but irl peripheral vision is normal
Let’s say it *seems* normal. We only get very blurry visual cues from peripheral vision and our brain has learned to organize them into “normal” perceptions. (Color vision decreases there too, yet we don’t notice that either.)
That the retina is curved helps too.
> Why is the “peripheral vision” of wide field of vision footage curved
Cameras have two imperatives: 1) *everything* has to be reasonably sharp (not only in the center, as for our eyes); 2) the receptor, film or digital sensor, has to be *flat*.
If you’re OK with mediocre sharpness and a very small aperture, a pinhole camera will give you perfectly straight lines (called *orthoscopy*) over a very wide filed of view as in this [example](https://i.imgur.com/1LTqzzF.jpeg). (Some people call the effect “perspective distorsion”, but that’s a misnomer.)
But if you need sharpness and more light-gathering, you need an objective. Expecting it to be sharp, orthoscopic, with a flat image field and with a great aperture is a daunting task – and heavy on the customer’s wallet. So compromises are made and chosen by the designer, one of them being giving up on orthoscopy. Sometimes it’s just a bit of barrel distorsion in cheap point-and-shoot cameras, sometimes it’s a full “fish-eye” rendition to get extreme fields of view as in this [example](https://i.imgur.com/sp89BEo.jpeg).
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