Tufte is the visual data presentation guru. If that means nothing to you, check out some of his books like Beautiful Evidence.
Tufte’s latest post is about the resolution (dots per inch) and the bandwidth of the human eye. He quotes a researcher who claims that the eye sends data to the brain at approximately Ethernet speeds – 10 million bits per second. I think they may be mistaken on this or misunderstood. The Optic nerve has nowhere near that bandwidth. The chemical based nerves have a bit rate of something under 100 bits per second and there aren’t enough neural paths to handle the high speeds. The eye itself does considerable preprocessing before the data leaves the eye, and the effective rate might be high, but physical rate is much lower.
There is much interesting discussion and a link to James Cameron about film frame rate and resolution. Modern television screens keep going up in resolution. Big screen TVs currently have a resolution similar to a super VGA screen from the late 1980s. Resolution will only go up in the future, making the current crop of $3000 plasma screens obsolete by Christmas. (Of course you can be like my Dad who wouldn’t buy a Color TV for 20 years after they came out because he was waiting for them to perfect the technology). It will be like the situation with early adopters of Color TV in the 1960s. There was precious little other than “The Wonderful World of Disney” in color for the first few years. There will be precious little High Res TV for a while. 720 pixels wide is hardly high resolution. 1024 pixels is small now by computer screen standards, but there is not much out there even at 720.
Now, Cinematography is being driven by screen resolution. There is mention that older special effects in movies were all done at the lowest DPI and frame rates, and are particularly choppy and obvious when translated to the higher resolution screens.
What interests Tufte is that the human brain can learn faster and experience more from the high res data. Frame rates and resolution have an impact on how we process information. This is surprising but not unbelievable. It looks like high quality data feeds are processed better by the eye and the brain and make a greater impact on out understanding, retention and appreciation.
Here’s a nice quote:
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.
As web page designers, this impacts us. We need to make out images and text as crisp an clear as the screen resolution can handle. We must cluster related information. This means larger images and using em or % (percent) as units of font-size and not point or pixel measurements. Pictures work better with more detail in them or with multiple pictures side by side for contrast and comparison. All of this is subtle stuff and if done right brings web design out of simple craft to a more artistic endeavor.
As an aside, I was thinking that this translates into fiction writing as the need to keep associated facts in close proximity in the flow of the narrative. An important fact in support of another important fact must be presented on the same page or even the same paragraph or there is a likelihood that the reader will not make the necessary associations. The association can be delayed, but only by banging the reader over the head in an unsubtle way. By keeping related facts close together you can generate a eureka feeling in the reader and engage them in the flow. A high information bandwidth from the narrative creates a greater feeling of engagement in the reader. The more you show the reader, the better he sees your imagery. This stuff about painting a subtle picture with sparse words, may only work if the writer is really, really good.