E3: Wii HD (Iwata speaks)

[blaydcor]

WereKitten said:

blaydcor said:
People overrate HD. It's an arbitrary number. It's not like there's a set resolution where our eyes are like "oh, SHIT!! Now that's high definition!". It's nice, I guess, but I honestly don't give a damn about HD and, being the largely ascetic guy I am, probably never will.

I agree that it's greatly overrated in gaming, but - just for information - there actually is a critical resolution based on the biology of human eyes.

Depending on how good your sight is, the size of the screen and the distance from which you're looking at the image, it would be the resolution so high that pixels are of the same size of the human eye's angular resolution (about 1'). Any higher resolution would be pratically useless because your eye would see neighbouring pixels as a single dot.

For a 42 inches screen watched from 2.5 meters this limit is slightly higher than 720p - unless I botched my calculations :) Bigger screen or closer distance, and the limit is higher.

If your sight is not 20/20, it's probably lower :)

@ringo

I do agree about considering the whole presentation. For example I value animations so much that I cringe at the screenshot frenzy of some people.

Just one remark though, it's not like a piece of art has to be pleasant or beautiful in a strict sense... its goal could be exactly to transmit desperation, depression, even madness (I loved Shadowman, back in the days)

I think I was dimly/intuitively aware of this, but not the specifics. Interesting to read, thanks for that.