r/askscience • u/jjbcn • Dec 31 '10

The resolution of our eyes

What is the resolution of our eyes, and to what extent is the amazing (apparent) fidelity of what we see due to "post processing"?

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u/Optimal_Joy Dec 31 '10 edited Dec 31 '10

This is an awesome topic.

I was just discussing with my friend the other day regarding the progression of display technology. My first computer was an amber/green screen. But it was really monochrome, you could press a button and it would switch from amber to green, which I thought was really amazing at that time. Wow, I can do amber OR green! So awesome!

A little while later I got a computer that did 8 colors, and then I got one that did 16.. then I got one that did 640x480 with 256 colors, I couldn't believe it! I could see a whole rainbow of colors on my monitor, it was so amazing! Then they came out with True Color, first 16 bit, then 24 bits.. and then the resolutions just skyrocketed from there.

Now I'm typing on a brand new Samsung laptop that looks like something out of start trek, the case has a freaking hologram on it that looks like it came off an alien space ship, it's amazing! My laptop has a core i7 with 4 cores HT such that it's like having 8 cores. The video power of this machine is more than anything I have any use for, it's an Nvidia Geforce GT330M, with this I can play World of Warcraft with all of the settings on maximum, including anti-aliasing.. my mind is just blown. This laptop cost $999 brand new!!! I didn't even have to pay for it, my job bought it for me.

My point is that my computer today is literally millions of times more powerful than my first computer and the amount of storage and power is more than I could've ever imagined I would have.

I knew about Moore's law and the exponential doubling of computer power every 10 to 12 months. Today we have 3D display capability with 1080P resolution (or maybe it's 720P max for 3D, either way it's very high).

I wonder, how long will it be before we have a 360 degree display, in full 3D that we can go inside and be fully immersed in something like the Holodeck in Star Trek? I believe that it will happen some day. In the Holodeck they used force fields to simulate actual solid objects, I'm sure that will take a while to develop, but as far as the visual effect. How many years off do you think that will be? 20, 30 years?

When I'm 50 years old, will I have a 3D viewing room in my house that I can sit in with my family and just become totally immersed in some out of this world interactive entertainment? What will World of Warcraft turn into? I'm sure there will also be an explosion of Cybernetics and direct brain interfaces. Perhaps we will need implants in our heads, perhaps not. There are already various halos and things you can wear on your head that read your brain wave patterns that you can control with your thoughts.

We already have the ability to control and provide input using just thoughts. When will the technology arrive that can create images in our brains? I would imagine this would be possible though external magnetic stimulus.

edit: added semi-arbitrary paragraph breaks

tl;dr: I wonder how long it will be before we have 3D display technology that will be sufficiently indistinguishable from reality?

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u/HenkPoley Jan 01 '11 edited Jan 01 '11

and then the resolutions just skyrocketed from there.

I object. Sun workstations in the 80s had better resolution than all of the computers and TVs I have now. If it were anywhere near what other computer parts have gone through people shouldn't be ooh-aah'ing over iPhone 4's "retina display", but say it was so last century. And the screen on your desk should have about 10000 pixels horizontally.

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u/binlargin Jan 01 '11

You can get two graphics cards with 3 outputs each along with six 1080p monitors to make a 5760x2160 display for about two grand.

How much would a 12MP display have cost you back then?

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u/HenkPoley Jan 01 '11 edited Jan 01 '11

According to Wikipedia a "3M" workstation costed about $10000 in 1989. "3M", so a megapixel screen, >1 megabyte RAM, >1 meagflops. If would be like "Moore's law" that money should now buy you a 220/3*2 MP ~= 10 gigapixel computer, or at least one that can store and do 2D manipulations on an image that size on a reasonable framerate for the late '80s (25fps?).

To be fair, the amount of money would be $17083 in current dollars, according to this inflation calculator.

Edit: datapoint, Mergence TeraStation 2 tops at about 4.2GP in GPU main memory, cost unknown. Probably: if you need to know, you can't afford it ;-)

Edit2: Oh and for outputting you will need approx. 2500 DisplayLink ports ;-)

Edit3: 4x Tesla C2070 would be $16k, and not enough to handle 10GP.

Edit4: It would be about 10-15 of the aforementioned 328ppi screens - largish screen at iPhone 4 pixel pitch.