Quote - I'm pretty sure that your field of view with one eye closed it a lot more then 30 degrees.

I'd say it's more then 90.

I can stare with my left eye at the center of my monitor and can see the lamp on the left side of the room that is actually slightly behind me.

Of course it doesn't look clear like what I'm staring at but it is visible, it's what you can't do on screen but it is what makes you feel in the environment and not just like you are looking at it.

Yes, the eye's field of view IS a lot more than 30 degrees, but clarity and focus are the issue here. Objects in your peripheral vision are really vague, I doubt I could sketch (or even describe accurately) the objects at the edges of my field of view, there just isn't enough information getting through. You know there's a lamp there, but you can't actually see any details on it.

The "50mm/30 degrees = field of view of the human eye" convention is really a compromise, it's the limit of what we can see clearly (and without undue distortion), not the limit of what we are aware of.

In photography or 3D rendering it's tricky to try to include more by widening the field of view, you tend to get a lot of stretching and distortion of objects near the edge of the view. Around 28mm is/was typically the limit for wide angle lenses in architectural photography, wider than that and straight lines start to curve.

In renders I don't go much beyond about 30mm in modo (you could go lower in poser), that's still nowhere near as wide as the eye can 'see', but it's about the  point at which the distortion starts to attract attention to itself, away from what should be the focus of the image. Near the edges of the image the proportions of recognizable objects like cars and furniture become screwy, things like floor and brick patterns look weird, and circular objects near the corners of the image get really elongated.

 

Quote - Furthermore, the Poser 50mm is actually off by a factor of 1.4x versus a 35mm SLR camera. It's much closer to the DLSR DX format - though by accident, not design.

So - in Poser, you would choose 35mm to match the magnification of what you'd see in an un-magnified rectangular window held up in front of your eye.

 

Ah, yes, 'Poser does things a bit differently' again. This is the sort of shit that makes poser such a pain in the arse to use. I know it's built on old foundations (which were probably weird even when P1 first appeared), but if Poser wants to shake off its 'toy' reputation and be taken seriously as a 'Pro' application, it's time all these strange little quirks and 'things not behaving quite as expected' were cleaned up.