Peripheral Vision in game goes Ultrawide thanks to the new Quake Mod

Standard vs Panini Projection

The default vision in Quake, developed by Id Software in 1996 was 90 degrees. This is not realistic as according to Wikipedia, a human being has 180 degrees of peripheral vision. The Fisheye Quake mod went a long way to rectify this problem. However, it suffered from issues of its own in the form of severe screen distortion.

After 20 years, a solution may be on its way. A modified version of Fisheye Quake called Blinky could be the end of the problem. The goal however, is not to publicise Quake rather it is an attempt to demonstrate a "proof of concept to put peripheral vision into games," without requiring VR goggles.

Blinky employs the Panini projection, "a mathematical rule for constructing perspective images with very wide fields of view.” This provides a larger field of vision without hampering the natural appearance. According to creator Shaun Lebron, "to use non-standard projections like Panini, Blinky first snaps multiple pictures around you to form a Globe of pixels, then it projects all those pixels to the screen using a Lens. You can enable a Rubix grid if you wish to visualize the mapping."

Blinky has been implemented in the Quake demo linked on the Github page. To be honest it does work pretty well but, the default setting had a minor glitch where there was a slight distortion at particular viewing angles. However, this will soon become imperceptible.

"I hope to apply this to modern graphics using frame buffers for environment-capturing and pixel shaders for projection. It would be interesting to see its impact on performance," Lebron wrote. "If this modern method is performant enough, I think Panini/Stereographic could easily become a standard for gamers demanding wide-angle video. But if it is not performant enough for live applications, I think it could still prove useful in post-processed videos using something like WolfCam. For example, spectators could benefit from wide-angle viewings of previously recorded competitive matches or even artistic montages."