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Eyes VS Cameras

Why this article?

If you read my last article Every UI Has A UI Designer you may have wondered why the most notable thing in our UI was not mentioned. The reason it wasn’t mentioned was that I felt that it deserved its own article and here it is!

Resolution

When I compare cameras like my phone to my sister’s phone. One of the first things to be considered is the resolution or the size of the pictures it takes. When it comes to our eyes it gets kinda complicated. Because our eyes aren’t cameras. Cameras have even resolution whereas our eyes have only a small spot with a clear picture. This spot is called the fovea it’s only about 2deg of our view. That’s about the size of the full moon in a clear sky. If our entire eye had the resolution of the fovea our eye would have a 576mp sensor that’s huge! and inaccurate because our eye isn’t all clear. A better estimate is closer to 130mp which is still huge. And bigger than most cameras. There are probably still many cameras bigger than 130mp but what’s important to remember is that we have the right amount. We don’t have too many pixels and waste processing power and data. We have just enough to see an extremely sharp image.

ISO

Alright moving to subtopic 3: ISO. ISO is the light sensitivity of the camera. As I’m writing this article I just realized that I know what ISO means but I don’t know what it stands for. So um, let’s look it up. Found it! ISO stands for International Standards Organization. Now I know why I never remembered it. Trust me ISO does actually mean the camera’s sensitivity to light. But what does that really mean? Cameras including our eyes can take in a whole lot of data. So much so that if we use the full sensitivity of the sensor in the daytime. all we would be able to see is a blinding white. If the ISO is too high data is lost in the brightest parts of an image so clouds would be big blobs of white and the image becomes grainy from tiny defects in the camera sensor. if the ISO is too low the dark parts of an image would turn black. Our eye auto-adjusts to the perfect ISO level which is usually as low as possible but without losing the darkest parts of the image. It’s estimated our eye can go from as low as 1 ISO which I don’t think any camera can do as most start at 100 ISO. And our eyes can go up to a max of 800,000 ISO in pitch-black environments. That’s extremely high!

Misc Facts

Post-processing

Any good movie always needs some editing done to it after it’s shot. And it’s the same with our eyes. Our brain does a lot of work on the video before it’s shown to our conscious brain. Also, keep in mind while we go through these points that all of these things are done without any noticeable lag or delay in video, it just makes each of these things a little more awe-inspiring.

Content-Aware Fill

Yep, that’s right the tool in photoshop. It’s in your brain too. For those of you who (don’t have Photoshop/don’t know what it is) Content-Aware Fill is a tool usually used to remove things from a picture by looking at the content and being aware of it and then filling the void with what it learned about the content. I guess you really should just use the tool to understand it 🤣. Anyway, our brain does that for our eyes. You see on our retina there is this one little spot that has no receptors to see stuff. There’s just a black hole in our eyesight and this is where the filling comes in handy.

Stereoscopic 3D

Stereo… what? We have two eyes. You probably already knew that. Even though we have 2 eyes we see just 1 video in our heads. How does our brain do that? I don’t know. But in the process of doing this, we get this amazing thing called Stereoscopic 3D. It allows our brain to estimate distances just by using the distance between our eyes. Pretty cool stuff.

Eye Movements

This isn’t really related to Post-processing but it was just really cool and I wanted to include it. So here it is! Our eye has 6 muscles to control its movement. One on top one on the bottom one on the left and another on the right. That’s only 4 can you guess where the other 2 are? I certainly would have guessed wrong the first time I learned this. One of these muscles is on top laying across your eye. Can you guess what they do? They roll your eye! Did you know your eye can roll? Try it yourself go in front of a mirror and tilt your head over and you will see your eyes roll to stay level. But why do they need to do that? Well have you ever tried taking a video in a car or while you are walking and when you’re playing it back you noticed it is really shaky. It would be pretty bad to live where that is what we see in our heads. Our brain does a lot of stabilization in the recording process by shaking our eyes up to 60 times a second to keep the video nice and smooth and sometimes that calls for some rolling.

The End…

In conclusion. I hope you learned something. And I hope you were able to see the sheer amount of design that went into our eyes. Made possible by our loving God Jehovah.

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