Visual Field

The visual field is uneven. It is not uniform and has its maximum definition in its central part.

Harry Moss Traquair describes in 1927 that our visual field as "an island of vision or hill of vision surrounded by a sea of blindness". The 'island of vision' corresponds to a sudden change of definition we have. Its empirical elliptical limits in the longest (horizontal) axis, are our Blind Spots.

'La Lumière à Sénanque' (The Light in Sénanque) is a chapter of 'Cîteaux commentarii cistercienses' publication of the Cistercian Order 1992. Its author, Kim Lloveras i Montserrat, argues that in the Romanesque age, people were aware of the particularities of our blinds spots as horizontal limits of the central good vision. Further, they know that more than a change in definition there is a strong change of perception of space. The person, the observer feels inside the central area and understands their external as 'their enveloping'. With this assumption, we can predict in what specific point the observer comes into or out to a concrete space (for example, into the apse). It is to say that it becomes a very helpful instrument of architectural design. They used a good vision cone with the apex is in the eyes of the observer, with a circular cross-section, whose diameter, like H.M. Traquair, is defined by the outer limits of blinds spots. They used a circular cross-section because they think that the good central vision has a circular form, probably by the belief that the circumference is more perfect than a ellipse.

In 2008, proposed by Kim Lloveras i Montserrat, takes place the 'experience of the cone of good vision' at the 'School of Architecture of Barcelona' of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. It is done with a large ellipse TK (theoretical ellipse very similar that proposed by H.M. Traquair for limits of his vision island). Its height is 3.10 m (twice of the high of the vision person) and its major axis has 3.94 m. It is from a point on the ground, previousl (located at 6.38 m), that the Observer of experience (with a normal vision) has the feeling of entering into the ellipse.

Our 'good vision cone' (which contains the 'island of vision') is really the zone of our vision with little deformation and also the limit in which we feel inside.