Why the monitor is square, not round: is it possible to make a round

The planets soaring in space have a round shape, our Earth is round, the Sun, the source of all our light, is also round. So why is the human eye, with a round optical field, forced to process information from rectangular monitors? Of course, we have two eyes, but this gives a three-dimensional illusion of an oval, rather than a rectangular field of view. And even if the photon had a shape, it would certainly be spherical, because it is described by sinusoidal waves and interferometry.

So why is the monitor of our laptop, tablet and phone not round, as nature requires?

Why do not produce round monitors

It turns out that in the USSR there were prototypes of spherical monitors. And the kinescope tubes were originally with a rounded screen, which underwent transformation for mass household consumption.

In fact, there are several versions of why the displays are produced in a rectangular manner.

Suppose, from a technical point of view, that modern monitors are relatives of movie screens, then tradition can be considered one of the versions of squareness. Everyone remembers a square film when the frames linearly follow each other, here the roundness would be strange.

A video, after all, also consists of frames, and in order to store large volumes, they must have a replicable format, which is usually considered a rectangle.

Reference! From the point of view of marketing and the promotion of comfort in everything, the transition from rectangular Cartesian to spherical coordinates has become almost impossible. Large-format panels give a larger image and fit perfectly into any interior.

And the technological process of producing square models is much easier than round relatives. There is less waste and the installation of rectangular elements takes less time than spherical components. Everything square is easier to measure, account for and store on rectangular racks, in rectangular rooms.

Is it possible to make a round monitor

If you approach the issue exclusively from a technical point of view, a spherical monitor is not a fantasy, but a very laborious and economically unjustified process.

To create a television picture, a linear sweep method is used when the beam, at a constant speed, moves horizontally and vertically, forming a raster by drawing horizontal lines and vertical columns. In a round form, due to the different length of the lines, this will not be possible.

Technically, no one bothers to do not a linear, but a polar scan with a constant angular velocity of the beam, as it is used in the radar. The difficulty arises only in the subsequent conversion of information from the film.

Interesting! An attempt to introduce a circular shape of a computer monitor into production was first undertaken by the leading engineer of the Taganrog Radiation Unit Plant, Vsevolod Saprykin. In the late 90s, Saprykin presented the management with individual development with a detailed description of the production process. After which the engineer was criticized and accused of profaning budget funds.

Is the standard operating system suitable for a round monitor?

If we assume that there is a round computer on the table and we have to work behind it, the first thing comes to mind: "How to synchronize existing software with the" new progress "? After all, all available equipment is focused on the use of square or rectangular formats, and in order to fully enjoy the work of a spherical display, carriers of this format are needed. All this will entail a lot of inconvenience. So, in order to shoot in a round format, you will need large reels with film, the projected image will be smaller, it will become much more difficult to crop and crop pictures.

Attention! The modern format is absolutely not adapted for a spherical screen. It is impossible to save the whole picture from a square medium, the extreme borders will be cut off by the geometric shape of the box, thereby losing the amount of information.

Pixels, in modern displays, are arranged in a rectangular pattern. If you try to place pixels in a rounded display while maintaining existing production technologies, they will have a rectangular shape, but with cropped short rows and columns at the edges. And to arrange the pixels in a circle, you will need to develop new production technologies, software and hardware, for which it will become a real nightmare.

But there are also advantages of this invention: programmers creating a new OS and UI will have an additional amount of work. So it turns out that rectangular monitors are absolutely not a whim of civilization.