Resolution and dimensional compression

A profound discussion of resolution and frame rate by James Cameron here

My work revolves around the routinely spectacular resolution of the human eye-brain system, and, in turn, that our displays of evidence should be worthy of the routine functioning human eye-brain system. This is, for example, the
conclusion of sparkline analysis in Beautiful Evidence, where the idea is to make our data graphics at least operate at the
resolution of good typography (say 2400 dpi).

Below is a link to an article in Current Biology (July 2006) by Judith McLean and Michael A. Freed, from the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and Ronen Segev and Michael J. Berry III, from Princeton University. The research suggests that the
human retina transmits data to the brain at the rate of 10 million bits per second, which is close to an Ethernet connection! See Kristin Koch, Judith McLean, Ronen Segev, Michael A. Freed, Michael J. Berry,
Vijay Balasubramanian, Peter Sterling, “How Much the Eye Tells the Brain,” Current Biology
16 (July 25, 2006), 1428-1434.

PDF file
here

Looking around the world is easier than analyzing evidence displays, and there may also be within-brain impediments to handling
vast amounts of abstract data, but at least the narrow-band choke point for information resolution should not be the display itself.

The average PP slide contains 40 words, which take less 10 seconds to read. Call that 1000 bits per second, which comes to
1/10,000 of the routine human retina-brain data capacity.

Memory problems can be partly handled by high-resolution displays, so that key comparisons are made adjacent in space within
the common eyespan. Spatial adjacency greatly reduces the memory problems associated with making comparisons of small
amounts of information stacked in time.