Michael here. I am at the White House in America's capital

Washington DC America makes alot of feature films every year

Hollywood but they don't make the most feature films every year Nigeria makes more

but the country that makes the most films every single year is

India every two years the country

of India fills up enough film with unique feature films

that stretch all the way from this city, Mumbai, to where I live

in London that's double what hollywood produces in two years

that is a lot of movies but is

real-life a movie? I've discussed the frame rate of the human eye before but how

does the resolution

of the human eye compare to a camera or screen?

VHS, laserdisc, DVD

Blu ray, IMAX. Numbers like these are pixel dimensions when multiplied

they tell us the total number of picture elements an image is made up of

a figure often used to describe digital cameras it might sound like

more is better but to be sure numbers like 1920 by 1080

are not resolutions per say more pixels is only part

of the equation. Resolution is about distinguishing

fine details and that depends on a lot of other factors

for instance the amount of light the sizeof the sensors

what the millions of pixels are actually encoding and

how close the subject is I mean up close

Salvador Dali's painting of his wife looking at the Mediterranean can be

resolved into boxes but from afar

well it's Abraham Lincoln. for crying out loud on a small enough screen

from far enough away low and high so-called resolutions on screens aren't

even resolved differently

from one another by your eye

how different nearby pixels are from one another also matters this is called

spatial resolution

for instance if I go out-of-focus

the number of pixels in the video frame stays the same but you can't resolve as much

detail now with all this in mind we can still

compare human vision to a digital image by asking a better question

assuming everything else is optimal how many pixels would you need to make an

image on a screen large enough to fill your entire field of view

look like real life, without any detectable

pixelation? Now we are getting somewhere

kind of. The analogy is still cruddy

because a camera snaps an entire frame at once whereas

our eyes move around. The brain amalgamate

their constant stream of information into what we call vision

sight, in fact the image created by the eyeball alone during a single glance

would hardly even be acceptable on a broken TV screen. We think

our eyes create images like this picture Guy took of me with a camera

but for one thing unlike a camera you've got some stuff

in the way for instance you are always

looking at your own nose and maybe even glasses

if you have them. Luckily our brains process those stimuli out because they

don't matter

and they don't change but thinking those are the only difference

is a pitfall, literally

Latinly. The fovea gets its name from the Latin for

pitfall, the fovea is the pit on your retina that receives light from the

central two degrees

of your field of view about the area covered by both your thumbs

when held at arms length away. Optimal colour vision and 2020 acuity

only possible within that little area when it comes to these limitations XKCD

has a brilliant illustration

it points out other problems like blind spots literal blank spaces

in our vision where the optic nerve meets up with the retina

and no visual information is received if you bought

a camera that did this you would return it

you can find your own blind spot by closing

you're right eye fixating your left eye on a point in front of you

extending your left thumb and then moving it

left-of-center slightly slowly carefully until

it's not there anymore crazy but of course

we don't see the world horribly like this because our eyes are constantly moving

dragging foveal resolution where ever we need it

and our brains complex visual system fills in details

merges images from both eyes and makes a lot of gueses what we can actually see

is a processed image not computer-generated imagery but

well meat generated imagery the neon color spreading illusion

is a great way to demonstrate this difference there is no

blue circle in this picture the white here

is the same as the white here, a camera

isn't fooled, a screen isn't fooled, only

you and the fleeting gumbo of ingredients you call perception

is fooled. Our vision

is not analogous to a camera but our reformulated question can still be

answered because human anatomy allows us to resolve to differentiate certain

angular distances famously Roger N Clark

used a figure of 0.59 arcminutes as the resolution of the human eye to calculate

based on the size of our total field of view

how many of these distinct elements could fit inside of it

the result was an approximation of exactly what we want to know

how many individual picture elements pixels our vision can appreciate

his answer 576 megapixels

that many pixels packed inside a screen large enough to fill

your entire field of view regardless of proximity

would be close enough to be undetectable by the average

human eye. But we should factor in the fovea

because Clarks calculation assumes optimal acuity everywhere, it allows the

eye to move around

but a single glance is more analogous to a camera snap and as it turns out

only about seven megapixels packed into the two degrees of

optimal acuity the fovea covers during a fixed stare

are needed to be rendered undetectable it's been roughly estimated that the

rest of your field of view would only need about

1 megapixel more information. Now that might sound low but keep in mind that there

are plenty of modern technologies that already use pixel densities

better than we can differentiate as bad astronomer deftly showed

Apple's Retina Display's truly do contain pixels at a density

average eyesight can't differentiate from typical

reading distances but the fact that there are screen sizes and pixel

densities that can fool the human eye

is not a sign that we see in

any kind of megapixelly way human vision just

isn't that digital I mean sure like a camera sensor we only have a finite

and discrete number of cells in our retina

but the brain adjusts our initial sensations into a final perception

that is a wishy-washy top-down processed blob

of experience it's not made of pixels

and furthermore unlike a camera it's not saved in memory with veracity like a

digital camera file

absolutely no evidence has ever been found for the existence of a truly

photographic memory and what's even cooler is that not only do we not

visually resolve the real world like a movie camera

we also don't narratively resolve conflict and drama in our lives

like most movie scripts. The point of all of this what I'm getting at

is an idea an idea that initially drew me to this question

we play roles in the movie of life

but its a special kind of movie cinematic victories and struggles are often

discrete resolved like pixels with unbelievably perfect beginnings and endings

whereas the real world is all about ear resolution

I like how Jack Angstreich put it in cinemania

in a movie a character can make a decision and then walk away from the camera

across the street and have the credits roll freezing life in a perfect happily ever after

but in the real world after you cross the street

you have to go home the world goes on

life doesn't appear in any particular pixel resolution

or narrative resolution things are

continuous the world was running before you came around and it will continue running

after you are gone your life is a plot only in so far as it begins

and ends and occurs in medias res

Damerish opens illustration for Charles McGrath's endings

without ending says it perfectly in life they're rarely is

the end, there is only

the and and as always thanks for watching