Not so blurry

[Maat]

Well, I'm myopic, astigmatic and now farsighted too. Tonight, while watching some show where the face of one person is pixelated for privacy, by chance I realized that in fact, if I watch this face over my glasses, it's not so blurry, I can see some details. A little less than a not pixelated face, but the difference with a squared face baffled me. It works too if it's not a video. So I found it funny that in a sense, even if you have a bad vision, you can see something better than someone with a good vision!

If you're blind as a bat like me, give it a try. I don't really understand why, but it works fine!

 

[Gawan]

Well, I'm myopic, astigmatic and now farsighted too. Tonight, while watching some show where the face of one person is pixelated for privacy, by chance I realized that in fact, if I watch this face over my glasses, it's not so blurry, I can see some details. A little less than a not pixelated face, but the difference with a squared face baffled me. It works too if it's not a video. So I found it funny that in a sense, even if you have a bad vision, you can see something better than someone with a good vision!

If you're blind as a bat like me, give it a try. I don't really understand why, but it works fine!

At least on my end, when I watch these pictures from further away, I can also see more details. I think with you seeing more unsharp it has then a similar effect.

 

[mkrnhr]

The capacity of the brain to construct images of the world from little information is phenomenal. For example, the field of view over which the eye forms a sharp "image" is very narrow, but the eye moves all around and a larger field of view is constructed.
As for pixelated images, I think two complementary effects take place. When considering a static pixelated image from afar, it looks blurry, and the brain is more used to infer the details from blurry images than from pixelated images if we know what we're looking at (a face, a silhouette, etc.). We can recognize a person's face from far a way even if we don't see all the details.
The second effect relates to moving images. If the person in a video moves relatively to the pixels, the brain infers the shape and some details of the face from the variation in intensity of those pixels. A similar (and probably simpler) technique is used in stellar astronomy (series of images with sub-pixel movements on each (dithering), which result in a sharper single image after some clever combination(drizzling)). Now it's possible to enhance resolution in videos to some extent: Enhance! – AutoStakkert!