Lets say you cover one eye and walk outside and immediately you see a vast intricate landscape. Your brain created this image from the light that came from it and entered your eye. Your eye is much smaller than the vast landscape though. So only a tiny portion of the light that the landscape is emitting is being used to create an image of it. Even though the area of the landscape is quite large, about how small is the area of light that is representing the landscape just before it enters your eye and stimulates your rods and cones? And in that small area, could I theoretically produce any image a human could ever possibly see threw that eye if I could somehow change the position and amount of photons in that area?
All of the light passes through the pupil, so yes, it is quite a small area, but the rays aren’t parallel.
What you’re talking about is essentially what a hologram does; it reproduces the light rays from and object (including their direction).
Yep. Before holograms there were stereoscopes, which did exactly this.
According to this site, human beings have a total field of vision of 140 degrees for each eye, or 160-208 degrees total. They have a focal range of up to 14 dioptres (in a child) and an f-number of around 2.55:
http://www.artinarch.com/vp05.html
The human eye is about 25mm in diameter:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AniciaNdabahaliye1.shtml
(Some sources say a little larger)
The maximum human pupil diameter when fully dilated is around 7mm:
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~jrg/CELT/ay250_012403.html
(Some sources say 8 mm)
I don’t know exactly what the OP is asking, but someone with a knowledge of optics should be able to work it out from that.
The area of light just before it enters your eye will be close to the pupil diameter especially when looking at distant objects (where the rays are almost parallel), i.e. a circle 7mm across for each eye. (This does not take eye movement into account, since the pupil will move even when apparently staring at something.)
However, the human eye cannot focus on objects so close. The first cite says we can perceive objects 25mm away, but can’t focus less than 150mm away. Simulating a more distant object with a converging lens just in front of the eye might be one way to achieve this, with a 7mm lens and an arbitrarily small target viewed in the lens.
Nim, I think you have a basic misunderstanding of optics. You might do well to look at howstuffworks.com and see how the optics of a lens focus an image. Unfortunately this is one of the tougher concepts in optics to understand and I’ve seen many illustrations that are wrong or misleading. Basically if you intercept the photons immediately in front of your eye or at the iris or in th emiddle of the cornera they won’t form an image at all. What the lens does it bend each light ray coming from any particular point in the real world so it goes to a single point on your retina.
Don’t our eyes only intercept light that is immediately in front of it. Where else would it intercept any? How far from the pupil is light being bent towards it?
It’s hard to answer this without explaining the basics of optics. Take a look at How vision works at Howstuffworks. Actually How cameras work may be more useful for this OP - check out both.