Why not just window the image to a smaller size and let the user move the window around?
This has been done and certainly is simpler, but there are two problems: First, without a full view, the viewer does not know where to put the window. The effect is much like trying to find a bird with a pair of binoculars. In other words, the user cannot easily find the regions of interest. Perceptual experiments have shown that viewers do not function efficiently with this type of display. Such displays are completely unusable for tasks such as remote navigation of a vehicle. It might be possible to first find a region of interest and then switch to a windowed image, but then other events that might be of interest are not available in the viewer’s peripheral vision (e.g., another person or object entering the camera’s field of view). Second, simple windowing is inefficient; it does not match the resolution of the display to the resolution of the human visual system. Matching the display to the encoding properties of the eye is the most efficient way to allocate image data bits.
