Very interesting stuff. What I think I find mind blowing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is only treating the eye as if it was a standalone imaging sensor. I wish there was a way that we could understand how other humans and animals <i>actually</i> view and perceive the world in an embodied way. I would imagine that each one of these animals processes their visual information in unique ways, perhaps more unique than their eyes.
It’s hard to discuss animal vision without bringing up the mantis shrimp, which is somewhat unique in this regard and also very bada*:<p><a href="https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp" rel="nofollow">https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp</a>
If you're interested in stuff like this, I highly, highly recommend Ed Yong's new book, An Immense World. There are huge parts of animals' sensory landscapes that we don't perceive, and he does a good job of letting you see the world through their eyes/smell it through their noses/etc. He also writes about the sometimes-wacky experiments scientists have done to tease out how animals use their senses.<p><a href="https://edyong.me/an-immense-world" rel="nofollow">https://edyong.me/an-immense-world</a>
I’ve found it interesting that the range of visible light for humans has the highest frequency roughly double that of the lowest frequency. Working by analogy to sound, we essentially see one “octave” of light and if we perceived frequencies into infrared or ultraviolet, they would perceptually look like variants of the color at 2× or ½× the frequency (which suddenly makes the adjacency of violet and red on the color wheel make sense). I kind of wonder whether anyone has ever made a camera that doubles or halves as appropriate light frequencies beyond the visible spectrum to make them visible. It would be interesting to see what the world looks like extending the range in either direction.
Fascinating! Though, I doubt that the jumping spider's view would have such a blowing DOF, as in the picture.<p>I guess, all vision systems (sensors and processing) would be optimized for primary needs, should these be food search, mating, shelter, and predator evasion?<p>As for dogs, I wonder if for them the "vision" is more than just optical pathway. It may be augmented with olfactory detail to "color" the visuals as needed for their priority. After all, colors is very notional concept, even to humans it's more than just wavelengths.
It's all really interesting. The fact that this is only the top of the iceberg astounds me. Using the eye as if it were a separate imaging sensor is not what this is about. My heart aches for a method to grasp how other people and animals see and perceive the world. Every animal's visual input is processed in a unique way, maybe even more so than the eyes themselves.
wouldn't the animal do the same thing humans do with Saccade eye movement, and integrate a "higher" Q image inside the brain, from the low res visual input?<p>I mean sure, you can't resolve finer than you see, but you can scan-and-pan and the brain does a wonderful job of faking out. Really, really good model, from really really tiny receptors.
i saw a good demonstration of this at Russia's Expo 2020 pavilion in Dubai:<p><a href="https://www.expo2020dubai.com/en/understanding-expo/participants/country-pavilions/russia" rel="nofollow">https://www.expo2020dubai.com/en/understanding-expo/particip...</a><p>they basically set up cameras where the various animals' eyes would be. they also added some filters in order to mimic animal sight. you would then get to see the feed via a display.<p>here's a video i've found on youtube that shows what i mean:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/t20_RmU3rLU?t=449" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/t20_RmU3rLU?t=449</a><p>it was actually quite interesting, especially for the kids.
There is also variation within a species, like humans, where you get not just the different forms of color-blindness, but also tetrachromacy where you can see <i>more</i> colors:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy</a><p><a href="https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-million-colors.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-milli...</a>
Fairly grim given the Holocene extinction I would say.<p>Back on topic though:<p>> The range of colours an animal sees depends on the combination of colour-sensitive pigments in their eye and the processing by the brain.<p>I take it the images here account mostly for the colour as it is detected and not so much the image that the animal brain perceives. Is that correct?
That's a simplification, I think. Many animals have good nightsight, meaning they see in infrared. That's probably also why they avoid approaching fires - those are too bright for them.