Slashdot Mirror
Human Eye's Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate
jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look "video-y," and why do movies at 24 fps look "dreamy" and "cinematic." Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here's the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we're no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we're throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution.
What about our eyes is oscillating?
The whole eye. Our eyes actually cannot detect a static edge, only transitions. The reason we can see non-moving objects is that the oscillations of the eye provide the transitions. There's a simple experiment from long ago which illustrates this vividly: put a black square on a white background, track a subject's eye motion and move that target with the eye motion so that the image is always hitting the retina at the same location, and voila, the subject cannot see that target.
Smart people don't choose to believe things because they want them to be true like you do. An idea doesn't have to give you a warm fuzzy feeling to be true.
If religious people had any proof, it would no longer be religion. Of course they don't, because the supernatural is imaginary. Too many people fail to grow out of their childhood superstitions, and never develop an evidence-based adult worldview.
Because in games, you're interacting with the content. Any delay in interaction is extremely jarring. Movies and such don't have this issue.