system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does human vision have a better horizontal resolution than vertical resolution?

Does having eyes in a horizontal line result in better horizontal resolution in humans or is it same in both horizontal and vertical directions? Also, what is the aspect ratio of human vision? Is circular, elliptical or something completely different?


I have recently studied few video coding standards and wondered why we have more resolution in horizontal than vertical in most standards.
gpt
Simple answer: each eye covers an area taller than it is wide, but combining the two human binocular vision is 200⁰ wide and 135⁰ high.

Complex answer:

There's not that much difference in the up/down vs the left/right distribution of  photoreceptors, but most of your "resolution" doesn't really come from them in a practical sense.

Your visual perception isn't really light entering your eye. You perceive a model of the world that exists in your visual cortex, this creates an imagination of the outside world dreamt by flesh and guided by sensory input and visual memory; it holds an internal perceptual "canvas" that is "painted" by your eye glancing at parts of the scene.

The high resolution part of the eye is the macula at the centre of your vision, it sees an area about the size of a large coin at arms length, and as you look around it paints in most of the detail and colour into your imagined world. Given enough light and 20/20 vision, its practical resolution is roughly that of 8k cinema screen, but it's 360p and blurred within a few degrees.

Human eyes constantly dart about to keep the canvas fresh, and like a pigeon jerking its head about you're actually blind during these "saccades". The movements are driven by the visual attention system, which gives the burning feeling that something must be looked at, and that is in part driven by the outer areas of the eye that detect movement. Force your eye to keep still for too long and the canvas will gradually descend into a dreamlike chaos; visual memory is transient and depends on constant change. Hallucinogenic drugs massively reduce this time window, if you're into that sort of thing.

So while eye resolution and field of view is part of the picture, eye movements and visual memory drive most of what you actually perceive. The canvas itself still seems wider than it is tall unless you shut one eye, but its characteristics are that of a window into a subjective, imagined 3D dream of the world, rather than being based solely on eye hardware.