My phone is normally worse for color gradients and contrasts than my eyes. Also, normally it has worse nightvision.
But when decreasing the shutter speed, for example in OpenCamera, I get crazy night pics.
I see that when its dark my FPS goes down, I see less frames automatically and totally cant control that.
Could this mechanism be altered, to have even less FPS but more photons in the soup to get brighter sight?
Yes, trying to hack my eyes here. “Getting used to darkness” is normally the pupils getting wider, there are quite some interesting plants to do that but I havent heard of anything altering the brains image processing.
Edit
I learned:
- in Nightsight we use the rod cells, which take longer to send a signal. That way they capture more photons, but the “FPS” is lower
- you can trick your iris naturally to stay open, like the Pirates did (some plants like nightshades also do this, applied locally)
Eyes don’t really have a concept of FPS because we don’t have shutters in the first place. The brain is just continuously interpreting what we see. And it fills in a lot of gaps: for example, we technically have a large blind spot right in the middle of the retina, and that’s why we’re more sensitive to movement in our side vision.
Cats see just fine in the dark, our eyes are just not sensitive enough to low light to be all that useful for us, but we could, if the eyes provided that input. Evolution just made it so we favored speedy and sharp vision in daylight rather than night vision, in part because we quickly developed technology (fire) to keep our areas lit as needed.
we technically have a large blind spot right in the middle of the retina, and that’s why we’re more sensitive to movement in our side vision.
You’re conflating the blind spot and the macula there.
We do not have a blind spot in the middle of the retina. If that were the case it would be pretty problematic for vision. What we do have is what’s called the Macula, an area of high concentration of cones and low concentration of rods. Cone cells give us highly detailed color vision, while rod cells only give us overall brightness, but are much more sensitive to light. That’s why, as you mention, we’re more sensitive to movement in our peripheral vision, and also why the center of our vision performs way worse in very low light situations. (Ever seen a faint star that seems to vanish when you try to look right at it? That’s why)
We do actually have a fully blind spot, but that one sits not at the center of the retina, but off to the side. It’s where the optic nerve enters the retina, and it doesn’t have anything to do with better/worse perception of movement, it’s just fully blind and always gets interpolated by the brain, it literally fills it up with what it thinks should be there. If you get a small object right into that spot for one eye and cover the other eye, it will just disappear.
They do. The eye doesn’t have “frames per second”, per se, because every neuron acts independently, instead of as a eye-wide “frame”. But the rod cells that your eye switches to for night vision have slower activation time than the cone cells, allowing them more time to capture photons, before telling the brain about what it saw. Just like how your camera switches to longer shutter times for night vision to capture more photons, before sending them to the SD card.
Rod cells also respond more slowly to light than cones and the stimuli they receive are added over roughly 100 milliseconds. While this makes rods more sensitive to smaller amounts of light, it also means that their ability to sense temporal changes, such as quickly changing images, is less accurate than that of cones.
Crazy! Thats it! Thanks a lot!
So its not the brain composing the image differently, but the actual chemical method the cells use to capture light. Will be hard to modify haha
Put another way conventional cameras work with cumulative sensors (at least for this conversation we can say they do) which record the total quantity of photons and their intensity being received in each spot. The shutter is the process of closing off light input and recording the data from the sensor. Technically there’s an upper limit to how much light cameras can take in, which they’d asymptotically approach I imagine.
Your eyes don’t work the same way. Each photodetector cell will send a signal when it reacts with a photon of sufficient energy (wavelength, intensity will increase the probability of reaction if im not mistaken) and send that signal to your brain. There’s a lot of other complicated stuff going on, but at the end of the day your photo receptor cells are only so sensitive, and if light is below the threshold that will activate them, you’ll mostly just get signal noise. This is true of conventional cameras too, but they are generally just tuned for a different purpose.
Animals with good night vision have highly reflective membranes behind their photo receptors to increase the probability of a photon interacting with a photo receptor, and often have different tuning on their whole eye optical systems that make them more sensitive, but also more likely to burn. There are always tradeoffs.
Would suck to have night vision during the day haha!
Thanks for the info! So a NVG collects the light and then shoots it out again? Or also increases the capture surface?
Night vision goggles usually are very sensitive to visible light yeah. Im not sure on exactly how the optics work but some modern ones are set up more like vr. Some are also sensitive to near infra red, and some see entirely in infra red. The latter are thermal imaging. The longer the wavelength you go (the more red) the more difficult it is to create sensors that receive a good image. You can imagine that putting a thermal eye in a warm blooded animal might be a bit difficult because the eye itself will be emitting light that overpowers the scene.
Yeah, NVGs are probably the most accessible option.
The human eye has three different photo sensitive cells, one of which only produces black and white image for low light conditions.
My family, myself included, has an history of some individuals being highly sensitive to bright light - to the point of being painful - but by contrast we enjoy a very sharp night/low light condition vision, to the point we can actually discern more detail under such conditions. There were some very talented night time hunters in my family.
It’s not eye or brain hacking just differently adjusted image acquisition hardware.
Does your family have light-colored eyes? Lighter eye colors tend to correlate with better night vision and increased light sensitivity.
No. Basic color is brown and some of us have a lighter shade of brown, slightly yellowish.
My eyes tend to grow lighter towards a green hue when it rains or heavy fogs form and set.
One grandmother used to say we had wolf eyes.
Do any of you sneeze when looking at bright lights?
Not to my knowledge. I personally am not affected.
My family have a thing for bright lights, we don’t like them usually, and they trigger sneezing. No idea why.
Three different cells? Cones, rods and?
Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell
That’s a mouth full.
I’m like you. Bright lights - including daylight without really dark sunglasses - are painful but in low light conditions I can operate far better than the average person.
I don’t know if anyone had this in my family before me, but I strongly suspect that my kids have inherited it from me. They are quite young, but we’ll see.
You get the odd reaction when everyone complains it’s too dark to do something and you reply it’s just fine?
More often than you’d think.
When I lived alone while studying, I usually kept only a tiny kitchen worklight on. My friends were always baffled by this when they came to visit.
Once my co-worker asked to borrow my favourite sunglasses. When she put them on, she was still for a moment and then went “MY DEAR GOD, HOW CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING WITH THESE ON?”
The only sunglasses that make sunny days outside enjoyable for me. And yes, they are very dark.
I learned how to handle sun light but I can relate with that so well.
