Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

What's the resolution and bitrate of a general human eye?

I have a theory: the ultimate limit of broadband upgrading movement is our brain's whole throughput. After that individual consumers' demand will slow down and the broadband market will be dedicated for industrial broadband market. :)




That's a hard problem.

The human eye is only ~2 megapixels but it's focused on a small part of your field of view. So if you wanted to fool the eye you either need to track what it's looking at or to create a huge high resolution screen most of which is ignored. Add in the ability to focus and you suddenly need to add depth information and a display that can handle it or you will not fool the eye. Now add the fact that most people have 2 of them and it gets even more insane.

PS: Video cards have far higher internal bandwidth than external bandwidth for a reason. Focusing on the brains bandwidth is not going to be enough.


I'm pretty sure I've read that the resolution is somewhat unlimited (i.e. it your field of vision blends in seemslessly with short-term memory) but the bandwidth is actually quite limited, but variable (i.e. can handle much change in a small area or little change in a large area).


Back in 1995 Jakob Nielsen estimated it as ~1Tbps. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9511.html




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: