In my opinion, if player looks in one direction, it should count as 3.
For exemple, if player looks East, he should see North-East and South-East as good as East. And so on.
Reason is, becouse, sometimes (quite often) when your char is running towards a hex, you cannot foresee which direction he will be facing (not to mention the zig-zag running). Also, there is a problem with the "black spaces" in my opinion, areas which is hard to look into, becouse of only those 6 (?) directions.