Funny how we see the world in landscape, but live it mostly in portrait.
Funny how we see the world in landscape, but live it mostly in portrait.
Not really a shower thought, I came to this perspective in my dreams. And yes, that night's sleep absolutely slapped.
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I'm not sure what you mean with "live mostly in portrait". Can you give an example?
Poah, ok let's do this:
- reading a book
- interacting with your smartphone
- using the fridge
- standing in an elevator
- street signs
- restaurant menus
- tapping someone on the shoulder (vertical not horizontal interaction)
- looking at paintings
- standing in line
- observing a statue
- interacting with your closet
- looking someone up and down
- etc, etc, etc
Just some I could come up with on the fly
a spectacularly healthy dose of cherry-picking with this one.
what about watching movies at the cinema? playing video games on the tv? train carriages? the back seat of a car? double beds? panoramas? the horizon? a computer's qwerty keyboard? side-by-side boobs? side-by-side arms? the ending shootout of the good, the bad, the ugly? thw viewscreen of the starship enterprise? car windscreens? baby got back? landscape paintings?
Most of those are quite specific actions and they don't really add up to "most of our lives".
For example I spend at least 8hours watching on landscape-screen at work (and a couple more observing at home). Reading books, menues, using the fridge, riding elevators or observing statues doesn't really add up to anything close to that.
Also some examples are a big confusing. Street signs are usually round, square or ... landscape. Generally when in traffic you'll be observing everything in landscape. Or how is standing in-line a portait action?
I think most people (at least me) are mostly living in landscape.
Text in a book is horizontal, also an opened book is most often wider than tall - so it's in landscape too. It's only in portrait when it's closed so it'll take up less space on the shelf - which is also horizontal.
You can use smartphone in landscape too, but it's not as convenient to hold, and read text. But for watching video, you bet I'll rotate it to landscape.
Text in a book is horizontal
on your phone too, but it is still in a vertical rectangle of view
also an opened book is most often wider than tall
but most often you are only observing a single page, don't you?
I think OP's point is not about the shape or layout of things, but the "rectangle of view" or "bounding box" or whatever.
You're only observing a single page, which is taller than wide, but you're also only observing a single word, which is generally wider than tall.
Open a picture on your cell phone. Any portrait picture. Now look at it. Do your eyes focus on the whole picture? No, you focus on a portion of it at a time. It doesn't matter that the orientation is vertical, the frame of your focus is the same no matter what you look at.
It's an interesting observation. We observe the world in landscape because our eyes are positioned to give us a goid balance between binocular vision and seeing predators in our peripheral vision, but most of our interactions are portrait, I suspect due to our upright posture. Most of the instances you mentioned are with things that either are, or are evolutiobs if things that were, designed around the fact we are talker than we are wide.
It would be interesting to observe whether animals with a different posture interact differently.