Human vision, peripheral resolution

[Pascal Scheffers]

Building things is about compromise, so is our vision - which has a high resolution focus zone with lots of detail and color sensitivity, but the periphery has a much lower resolution.

I was wondering if such a thing would work, could be made, would be useful in a camera. The middle zone, say the current S35 or S16 zone has very high, 4k, 3k, resolution, but a much larger outer edge has a (much?) lower resolution. Could that enable a 645 size sensor to be much more affordable/smaller package? How would you use that for story telling?

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Peripheral vision follows the eye movement. Eye moves across the whole frame.

That would require the point of interest having to be fixed in the middle of the frame.

 

[Pascal Scheffers]

Yes, I guess it would. Just like it is now - but with lots of peripheral imagery. You'd still shoot for the middle bit, the sensitive part, you'd just end up with tons more reframing ability information or things to project on a huge screen (dome?)

I mostly started wondering about this because, for example a Scarlet 2/3 will have its 3k over roughly the 'crop size' of the S35 MX sensor in a 2K window. So if you were to make a sensor with multiple pixel densities, starting with a high density center, then one or two lower density rings around that... multiple cameras in one. There is probably a technical reason or three why this can't be done, starting with shutters.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

This might be useful as a form of compression. If you could use a facial recognition and eye tracking feature in the TV to download more detailed wavelets wherever they're looking. But you would need like 0.1ms latency in your internet connection and a rediculously fast processor... at which point you might as well just stream the whole image with your super duper future technology.