> "emulating human vision" is a distraction here.

Is it though? I read your comment first and agreed with what you wrote, but then I saw the GIF at the top of the article and instantly got what they're doing. They're solving what I call the problem of "taking a photo of what you see".

(I don't know what the professional vocabulary is for this, so please excuse the long-winded explanation.)

Here's the scenario: when I sit on the chair and look straight forward without moving, I can see a certain area of the room in a certain way. If I take out my phone, place it where my eyes are and take a photo, the resulting image looks nothing like what I just saw from that position. The biggest difference is, it captures much less of the field of view, but also the angles look wrong.

I also repeated this "experiment" virtually. The other day, I was doing some interior design in Blender, and created a room and a corridor using real dimensions. I tried, out of curiosity, to render a view from the perspective of myself (using my eye height). I explored camera configurations for a good hour, and couldn't find anything that would render the image corresponding to how I would perceive that space in real life. Again, the main problem was, either the field of view was too small, or angles were too badly distorted.

Of course a flat image of a scene, viewed from distance, is not the same as seeing the scene itself. Both my phone and Blender are correct. Perhaps they reproduce exactly what I'd see if my phone and screen were windows to the scene. But that's not what I'm after, that's not how my brain tries to interpret these images[0]! Instead, my mind tries to comprehend the image as if my eyes were the camera. It does some weird and hard to describe mapping[1], trying to put itself in the place of the camera, and immediately notices that the image doesn't look like what eyes would perceive.

When I saw that GIF showing a room rendered with hFOV=160°, the FOVO variant immediately clicked. My brain took that image, did its weird mapping, and concluded that this is exactly how the room would look like to me, if I was standing where the camera is!

So in my books, whatever they're doing, it's a big step in the right direction. These corrected renders feel like what I'd see if I were the camera. For games, this could improve immersion when playing on a flat screen. Outside of games, such transform on a photo would help people communicate their perception of the things they photograph.

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[0] - In this case. I have no problem seeing a picture as a picture, but I can also try to see it as recording of perception. It's a choice I can make. I assume that's pretty standard and everyone can do this if the image looks close enough to first-person view.

[1] - The best description I can come up with - and mind you, I'm going off my feelings and introspection - is as follows. Assume a simplified model of sight as made of 3 layers. In layer 1, you have raw input signals from the eyes, which give you two tiny images. Layer 2 expands these images into an unified, much larger image, correcting for saccades and filling in blanks via memory and inference. Then layer 3 tries to understand the image.

What my brain seems to do, when I'm trying to comprehend a first person perspective render or a photo, is identifying that artificial picture, isolating it and spawning a subprocess running just layer 3, feeding that artificial picture as its input, as if it came from the layer 2.