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.

Comments

Bring on HFR

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, am sick of slow (seconds-long!) pans across scenery that *still* end up with judder and motion blur.

HFR isn't a gimmick like migraine-inducing stereoscopic "3D", it's more akin to adding color instead of relying solely upon greyscale for film presentation.

Like all tools, I'm sure it can be used for both good and evil. Blame evil, jump-cutting directors if the dark side is channeled.

It's in the image

[Diddlbiker]

Movies tend to be shot around 1/50" shutter speed, and that creates motion blur. The motion blur actually helps us see the animation as smooth, even at "only" 24 fps. Games on the other hand are razor sharp and will hence look much more like a staccato sequence of images than as an animation.

Or so I was told by a moviemaker

Re:The human eye is proof God exists

[jeffmflanagan]

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.

Re:Mushrooms (may work with other drugs)

[itzly]

Unless of course, the mushroom just make you think this is happening.

Re:"Your eyes oscillate"??

[tlhIngan]

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.

The other reason is the "sensors" we have are quite poor - the eyeball itself is actually a very low resolution device - the high resolution center part of the eye covers such a narrow field of view that it's practically useless if it was a fixed camera, while the peripheral vision is so low res it's unusable.

Instead, what happens is we evolved a gigantic amount of wetware to process the image into a high-resolution image we perceive - the brain does a lot of visual processing, and the eyes rapidly move (or oscillate) to move the sharp high-res center vision around to give you a much higher "virtual resolution" than the actual Mk. 1 Eyeball can achieve.

Of course, this visual processing comes at a price - optical illusions abound because it's very easy to trick the wetware into seeing things that aren't there, because the information is often interpolated, shifted in time, etc.