Rectangular video formattings are well suited for a few things: reading text, displaying 2D tables, tiling(cartography) and pictures of rectangular objects, but that's about it.

For an application that emulates first-person "looking", ie: movies, entertainment TV, etc. the field-of-view and attention focus of human eyesight is roughly elliptical: corner elements are so non-sequitur that TV networks often park advertisements there with almost no degradation of entertainment quality.

So that's the idea: elliptical recording/playback devices, and storage-format.

Using pixels, identical in both size and count, an elliptical screen will be almost 13% larger in both height and width than a comparable rectangular display. A 32" rectangular TV's worth of pixels is equivalent to a 36" elliptical TV.
-- FlyingToaster, Feb 15 2013

I think it'd make me feel like i'm in Flash Gordon or something. I have thought about spiral scanning in the past. I wouldn't see my field of view as elliptical, even though it sort of is (maybe more movie binocular-style field of view in that sense) because the back of my head isn't a colour. Interesting, [+].
-- nineteenthly, Feb 15 2013


It's not only physical field-of-view of course, but field of perception, which is mostly going to be centered since that's where cameramen put it.

And yes, there's a good possibility that the Buck Rogers TV genre did futuristic elliptical screens for the same reason: a larger perceptive field for the same amount of electronic bandwidth.
-- FlyingToaster, Feb 15 2013


I was sure I had an annotation here somewhere...
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Feb 15 2013


ah, you did, I went to swat a spider on the screen with my mouse pointer and hit the delete button... something about pork pie hats ? no, wait...

"I don't see how manufacturing costs would be more expensive than rectangular unless LCD screens are cut out of immense swaths of tri-pixel sheets" (?).

The contested figure 1.128… is (4/pi)œ : the answer to the oft-asked question "How much taller and wider is an elliptical screen compared to a rectangular screen of the same aspect ratio and surface area ?"

ie: the 32" >> 36" claim is poetically licensed only in respect unit of measurement (diagonal inches). More precisely worded the resulting ellipse would fit into a 36" rectangle (36.1 actually).
-- FlyingToaster, Feb 16 2013


// TV networks often park advertisements there with almost no degradation of entertainment quality. //

That's a very subjective statement; once perhaps true, it now only highlights the trend in animated ads, ads that take up fully a third of the screen area, seizure-inducing flashing ads, ads for the program that is currently playing and, most maddening of all, twitter feeds. Honestly, I really do not want to know what the tweeting viewer thinks of a dime-store 'reality' show that's only in production because it's a cheaper alternative to a test pattern.
-- Alterother, Feb 16 2013


In the same way as a soluble computer consisting of small components with LEDs on them (which is an old idea of mine) could shape itself differently, maybe a bunch of optical fibres could be arranged elliptically, rectangularly and so forth.
-- nineteenthly, Feb 16 2013



random, halfbakery