How HD is real life?

But it wouldn't work like that,

We can notice the difference (if you look hard enough) if one pixel was a different colour, but you wouldn't notice 1 atom change colour.

Also you can't do it in terms of atoms, If you are looking at something very very far away you would be looking at so many compared to if you were just looking at your hand really close to your face.
 
In terms of what your eye can distinguish off the top of my head its somewhere around the equivalent of 6.5K pixels vertically (or it might have been horizontal with slightly less vertical).
 
Mason- said:
Also you can't do it in terms of atoms, If you are looking at something very very far away you would be looking at so many compared to if you were just looking at your hand really close to your face.
Click to expand...

Indeed, but let's say just on the computer screen itself, on the very surface, how many atoms would there roughly be? Would it be possible to distinguish this on just one layer?
 
Exactly, if you are talking about how many atoms there are on the 'skin' layer that you see on an average 22" monitor, god knows.
 
The amount of squared Planck lengths of the screen is the maximum possible resolution of reality corresponding to the screen.#

(3.457×10^34)^2 for 22"
 
Last edited:
No one takes into account the fact you are only really aware of so much beyond the center of your vision, perceived detail goes down and instead motion and light changes become more obvious, theres a lot more to vision that just the eye, the brain does a lot of post processing.
 
Based on the above data for the resolution of the human eye, let's try a "small" example first. Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be
90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).
At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see
120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.
Click to expand...
/thread
 
I suspect the answer is actually the technical specification of our eyes.

Or at least a vague approximation.

Bearing in mind if we move our field of view too quickly we do get ghosting and blur (which is why some optical illusions work so FPS is perhaps not the best way to put it since on a screen you can detect a faulty frame in

Also resolution, there's no pixels or visual defects, just blur when our eyes fail to focus as we only have a limited range we can resolve images clearly. You wouldn't list this as a Y by X resolution it would be in degrees of vision and distances a clear image can be received in.

Refocusing speed is something else which may be tricky to add in, switching from a focus on a tree 300m off to a piece of paper thrust under your nose is not instant.
 
Lysander said:
If you can fit 1080 horizontal lines on a 16:9 monitor, how many atoms could you fit in the same space?
Click to expand...

From some napkin maths, in a 22" screen at 16:9 you could fit somewhere in the region of 1.69*10^22 atoms in one layer on the surface of just the screen.
 
Our eyes don't really work in a comparable way to the resolution of a screen, but arknor's quote is reasonable stab in the dark for this sort of thing.
 
I only have 1 eye, which is tunnelled, and I wear a -26.5 lens. Something tells me that I see slightly less than 576MP :-) I do like the answer about HD eye though and the 576MP. I can appreciate BRD quality over DVD though and I have no problem seeing close-up.
 
Depends purely on your vision :p

(I felt like saying that after reading the thread title, didnt notice its about atoms).
 
The answer actually is:

No-body knows.


Squash it far enough and you'll get a black hole - God knows how dense those things REALLY are.
Though a 22" black hole other problems I imagine
 
james.miller said:
so the question is how many atoms can you fit in the same space, and your answer is 576 mega pixels? :confused:
Click to expand...

you can see a pixel but can you actually see an atom with your naked eyes?

anyway you know 1920x1080 is something like 2.96mega pixels

if the human eye in mega pixel terms is 576mega pixels you get the idea of what the "HD real life" resolution is for humans.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom