THE HUMAN EYE

The characteristic feature of human vision is its higher resolution at the fovea, with resolution falling away towards the periphery of the retina.

The limit of human visual resolution is about 1 arcminute at the optical center, and this falls to 10 arcminutes at 10 degrees off the optical center.

A conventional screen display that uniformly achieves 3 arcminutes per pixel (as with 1280 pixels across a 60-degree field of view) is wasting much of this resolution [Helman'95].

The retina has light sensitive receptors called cones (near the fovea) and rods towards the periphery.
-- The cones are sensitive to color, while the rods are sensitive to light intensity.

Information from the retina is sent along the optic nerve to the brain.

The two optic nerves meet at the optic chiasm
-- information is exchanged between the 2 eyes before being further sent to the two halves of the brain (along the optic track.

The optic track ends at the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN).
-- from the LGN, information is sent to various parts of the brain, and in particular, the visual cortex.