"Round vision" likely means seeing on a curved surface or perceiving wide, panoramic, or stereoscopic (360°/spherical) views. Concise explanation:
- Optics and projection: The retina (or a camera sensor) is a curved surface that receives light from a wide field. Lenses bend (refract) light rays so that images from different directions focus onto appropriate parts of the curved receptor. In human eyes, the cornea and lens create an inverted, curved projection onto the roughly spherical retina.
- Field of view and overlap: Each eye has a roughly 120°–200° horizontal field (central binocular overlap ≈120° gives depth perception). A curved or wide-angle imaging system (fisheye lens, panoramic camera, or spherical projection) maps large angles into the sensor by compressing peripheral rays.
- Mapping and distortion: Wide-angle (round) views require non-linear mappings (e.g., stereographic, equirectangular, or fisheye projections). These preserve some properties (angles, areas) but distort others: straight lines may curve, scale varies with angle.
- Brain reconstruction: The visual cortex stitches inputs from both eyes over time into a coherent spatial model. It corrects for distortions, infers depth from binocular disparity, motion, and perspective, and fills blind spots.
- Technological equivalents: Fisheye lenses, panoramic stitching, and spherical cameras mimic "round vision" by capturing rays over large solid angles and remapping them to flat images using projection formulas.
Relevant references:
- Hecht, Optics (sections on lens imaging and wide-angle optics).
- Hubel, D. H. (1988). Eye, Brain, and Vision.
- Gonzalez & Woods, Digital Image Processing (wide-angle and projection transforms).