Second question, is 1280x960 enough resolution? People see at significantly higher resolution and we can differentiate objects at further distances than a camera of this resolution. That means Tesla has less frames in which it even has a chance to identify a car coming at you in T intersection at 60-70mph.
Can someone tell me how I’m wrong?
Well, here’s something. I don’t want to say wrong, “wrong” is too strong a word.
The optic nerve doesn’t have anything like the bandwidth necessary to carry all signals from the entire retina (sensing portion of the eye) so there’s a lot of preprocessing that goes into it before the signals are sent to the brain. That’s the basis for a lot of optical illusions. Your high resolution vision is only for a tiny tiny portion of the visual field, at the very center of where you are looking. The brain fills in the rest making you think you have high resolution throughout your visual field. That and the brain fills in color for you. You can only sense color in the center, otherwise it’s grayscale and your brain helpfully fills that in for you as well. And there’s a blind spot, the brain fills that in as well. There are certain types of visual information that immediately cause you to move your eyes. Movement is one, if you see unexpected movement out of “the corner of your eye” you’ll immediately look toward that movement, then you get the high resolution view.
Eyes are neat. You have 3 colors of receptors in the normal human eye, but only a tiny fraction of them are blue receptors. By far most are red followed by green then blue. Why? Blue light is scattered just as it is in the sky, so more receptors wouldn’t help. And the rods, people think they‘re for night vision only but the rods are also used for daylight vision. The rods provide virtually all your off axis vision. They don’t carry color information.
And air, it’s opaque over most light wavelengths. There’s a band in which air is transparent, your eyes are evolved to precisely see in that just that transparent wavelength band. For fun, look at the curve of light transmission through air vs wavelength. Then look at the sensitivity of the eye vs wavelength. It’s amazing… well until you think about it. It had to be that way.
Back to the subject, the camera will have the same resolution throughout the frame. Comparing the whole frame resolution of the camera to the resolution of a pair of human eyes just isn’t valid. And we didn’t even touch on 3D perception. That’s a whole other discussion. And there are brain circuits that keep your eyes accurately pointed even as you move your head. And there are inputs from the middle ears.
Did I say “neat”? Neat doesn’t even begin to describe just how stunningly amazing our eyes are.
OK, you guys are here for the Tesla stuff, not to hear me go on about eyes. But if I’m comparing Tesla to eyes, there’s no comparison, none at all.
Best,
David