576 Megapixels

[uaiomex]

Interesting article with great photos of the human eye and two great videos.
Just sharing.
Comments?
Eduardo

http://art-sheep.com/?p=9814

[Telecaster]

Love the eye photos. IMO the author should've noted in the article proper that most of our visual acuity is concentrated dead center in our field of view. Resolving capability drops way off outside this small area…so that 576mp figure is a bit misleading.    Also, suggesting that women see "colours brighter" than men due to having more cone receptors? Hmmm… Note that ~13% of women are potentially able to perceive finer (or maybe even just plain different) color gradation than men due to having cones with four peak wavelength sensitivities rather than the typical three. But I'm not aware this has been studied in any depth.

-Dave-

[uaiomex]

Good annotations, Dave.

Love the eye photos. IMO the author should've noted in the article proper that most of our visual acuity is concentrated dead center in our field of view. Resolving capability drops way off outside this small area…so that 576mp figure is a bit misleading.    Also, suggesting that women see "colours brighter" than men due to having more cone receptors? Hmmm… Note that ~13% of women are potentially able to perceive finer (or maybe even just plain different) color gradation than men due to having cones with four peak wavelength sensitivities rather than the typical three. But I'm not aware this has been studied in any depth.

-Dave-

[NancyP]

Unfortunately the clinician mode kicks in and I start looking for Kayser-Fleischer rings, etc in the irises. Which brings up the topic: specialized eye examination kit used - Zeiss makes clinical microscopes used by opthalmologists, you may have been examined with such a microscope. One of the key features is a "slit lamp", which as the name suggests projects a thin vertical light beam on the cornea to facilitate seeing features requiring directional lighting.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit_lamp

[amolitor]

That is an absurd article. "resolution" is a meaningless metric here in the first place, and in the second place their reasoning is ridiculous.

You can distinguish some lines that are so and so close together, sure. In the center of your vision. And then you can sort of "see" about 120 degrees by 60 degrees. Sort of. Putting those together, you get 576 megapixels. Which presumably you can achieve by scanning back and forth and back and forth. You might as well say that a Nikon D800 has a 36 megapixel sensor, and can take 100,000 exposures before the shutter packs it in, so it's actually a 3.6 petapixel camera.

The eye is in fact a terrible optical instrument, vision is a construct of the brain. Resolution is meaningless for a bunch of reasons, including (my favorite) because large parts of what you "see" are simply invented by the brain. See "stopped clock illusion" for instance.

[Telecaster]

The eye is in fact a terrible optical instrument, vision is a construct of the brain. Resolution is meaningless for a bunch of reasons, including (my favorite) because large parts of what you "see" are simply invented by the brain. See "stopped clock illusion" for instance.

I'd say our eyes are as good as they've needed to be (though I wish mine didn't need glasses to focus properly). But, yes, our brains do a helluva lot with quite meager optical input.

I used to think turkeys were rather stupid birds. But then I saw an insightful documentary about them, which made clear they have all the smarts they need to thrive in their natural habitat. I no longer look down on turkeys.

Also, I find it interesting that when we refer to conscious mental processing we use the words I and me. "I wonder why…" or "That's just me thinking out loud…" Whereas when we refer to sub- or un-conscious mental processing we usually say "the brain" or at best "our mind." As though we're reluctant to take full ownership, even though such processing makes up most of what we cognitively are. 

-Dave-