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Comment by cookingrobot | Hacker News Reader

I walk forward a lot more than I walk side to side, and the stuff I pay attention to when walking is more generally arranged vertically than horizontally.

All I’m saying is the appeal to nature of landscape mode doesn’t seem like the whole story.

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I'd say it has more to do with human vision which cover a wider horizontal angle than vertical.

The medium (film) maybe adapted to how we see. Nowadays it might be adapting to how we hold the thing we see through.

I hadn't considered this! It's a good point.

Aspect ratios were surprisingly all over the place in early film. Now I'm wondering what parts of aspect ratios were driven by the actual physical characteristics of film.

It's not only a good point, it's the correct point.

If videos had to match the field of vision, and this was the audience's primary concern, I'd 100% agree! I think it's close to their primary concern when watching something like a nature documentary or a historical drama or playing a video game where you walk around a landscape. Vertical video has convinced me that you can tell some kinds of stories and convey certain kinds of info without using deliberate backgrounds, people standing next to each other talking, and people moving around. In vertical video you see a lot of cutting between two people, people talking about being in an environment that does not match their background, or one person playing multiple people. You don't need to learn pesky blocking or how to act with your body. Things that used to seem static, like giving a lecture while standing still, can seem reasonably dynamic. You can just focus on the human face. It's an option with pros and cons and it will encourage certain kinds of uses

Rather than guess, do some research ;)

Vertical is simply a thing, because phones are generally used in portrait mode.

The traditional aspect ratios were created to suit human vision.

In order to represent your walk vertically in a film, the camera would need to be overhead, directed at the ground (or beneath you, directed upwards). You walk forward from your own perspective, but it's rare from other people's perspectives (and still doesn't matter for horizontal vs vertical, since it's the Z dimension, not X or Y). Using depth to represent motion is a pretty bad idea most of the time, given that it's the dimension where movement is the hardest to notice (again, there are exceptions (precisely when you want the movement in the periphery to be hard to notice, only to make it more noticeable when the thing the moves gets closer (or the opposite))).

If you recorded Lord of the Rings, or Interstellar in portrait orientation, they would be pretty crappy films.

> the stuff I pay attention to when walking is more generally arranged vertically than horizontally.

I don't know what you mean.

Another point: your eyes are organized horizontally, not vertically. You have move horizontal vision than vertical. By filming in vertical orientation you quite simply make things more cramped, quite possible losing the space you could use to put more objects in, or just space out the objects you have in order to make things less messy.

Again, there are artistic reasons to sometimes prefer portrait over landscape, but that doesn't mean it's a good default. Making good films requires being conscious of those things, understanding that they are not arbitrary (therefore left just to which way it's more comfortable for people to hold their phones).

But your field of view is far wider than it is tall.

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