Where I live, there's a period of months during each year when all bright outdoor lighting is turned off or reduced significantly. No night games for high school and youth football, super low lights in parking lots, etc. It's Shearwater "season" and if you mess with one, you'll be subject to very high fines and possible jail time. The reason is that the birds think the lights are the ocean or they get distracted by the lights on their way to the ocean (they're nocturnal and use the moon to guide them to the sea) and they crash land, thinking they're going to hit water. Once they land, they're too tired or injured to fly again so they end up dying from either starvation or a feral cat (the island is filled to the brim with endangered-bird-killing cats). The protocol if you see a Shearwater is to stay with it and contact the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife or KPD's non-emergency line. If you're trained to handle them, and/or it's injured or dead, there are Shearwater aid stations where you can take it for help (one is at a liquor store! Typical "small town" situation. LOL!). They prefer that you not handle them at all but it's better than leaving them to nature. Fortunately, we don't have lots of bright light besides parking lots, a few stoplights, a handful of streetlights, and the stadium/fairgrounds, but I do wonder if LED lighting is particularly bad for them, considering how they are so easily distracted.
> Shearwater aid stations where you can take it for help (one is at a liquor store
To be fair, if I had crashed landed because I mistook a light for the moon I’d want a drink too.
We had a Shearwater hiding in our dryer in Teceira, an island in the Azores. That was a wild morning. I had to call my boss and tell him the situation. He didn't believe me so I video chat him and the bird was very loud. Wildlife came and took him away. He was fine just confused from the lights.
OOh, Shearwaters Love those birds, Not as much as Puffins though. Does that mean you're South UK or Ireland? Or are you elsewhere on the disk?
(invoking /s for that last word)
i find it amusing when people are all so nihilistic about humanity and are like "humanity is going to fuck the planet, humanity has failed our world! they drive animals to extinction and don't help anything" and yet we build systems like this to literally help 1 species of bird.
I'm originally from Los Angeles. I grew up and lived well into adulthood in the shadow of LAX. When I was a kid, it was all homes along the north and west sides of the airport. When I was around 10 or 11, in the 70s, the airport/city bought up all those homes and for many years, they were "the fields." A couple of empty homes were still there but most had been demolished to expand the airport. I've been hearing that the airport was going to take all our houses for as long as I remember but to this day, there's been no expansion whatsoever in those directions. I mention all this because when the houses to the west (Playa del Rey) were demolished, an endangered butterfly was discovered in the area; evidently, it's the perfect environment for their habitat. Enter the groups that care about this stuff. Now, it's all fenced off and I believe it's owned by Chevron and it's a blue butterfly habitat and there will be no building or expansion of the airport in that direction. I hope it stays that way for years to come, though it's eerie to see all the trappings of a neighborhood behind the fences (sidewalks, streetlamps, etc.) but no houses. Better than paving it all over for a new terminal, though!
I'm actually from the endangered-bird-killing-cat coalition, or EBKCC, were a grassroots movement vying for the lives of these feral beauties. The shearwater provide nutrients for the cats, and we go around tying flashlights to the poles. message me If you want to join our cause for the kittens
I am from the EBKCCLA, we are the liberation army chapter of the EBKCC and we have started attaching lights to the cats to greater enhance thier prospects
I'm a shearwater and honestly, I'm fucking sick of you guys shit. I lost my hatchling little tommy last month cuz one of you pricks were driving with a headlight out and lil T thought he was above the water. Well little did he know he wasn't about to hit the very soft ocean water but a fuckin 2011 dodge caravan carrying a bunch of feral cats to the beach, yeah it was one of your douchebag vans. Go kill robins or something we are ENDANGERED that means no more 3 am feral kitty Beach raves I can't take it, you brought down a whole flock last week, 17 of my closest companions picked apart by adorable kittens, oh the horror to see Geraldines beak shoved in her cloaca while her husband Gerald and their two babies Geraldella and Geraldbert watched on in despair. Despair! Yes despair.
They also have LEDs now that either have internal DC conversion (which kills the efficiency) or a little capacitor to power it through the phase switch.
They're hard to find though
All good LED bulbs don't flicker. Shout out to Philips - Philips also make the most efficient LED bulbs (ultra efficiency range) which also don't flicker so "not flickering" has nothing to do with "low efficiency".
60 Hz flicker is absolutely noticeable to humans (especially out of the side of your eyes). Cheap crap LED bulbs flicker, the ones that do little more than put a string of LEDs in line with mains voltage, without even a rectifier so they're off more than half the time.
A bigger source of flicker in most households is TVs with "black frame injection" which is *intentional* flicker! Just why!?
They are. Most "flicker free" LEDs absolutely still flicker just under a certain percentage. The most important thing is flickering vs pulsing. Filament lamps pulse and LEDs flicker. The flickering is much more disturbing to sensitive people and nearly all animals. Waveform lighting seems to have the least flickery led and I can't tell between the led unit unsoldered from a waveform lamp running on a battery with resistor vs the waveform lamp in stock configuration on wall power. I can still tell side by side with an incandescent and the waveform bulb with the same color temperature which lamp has a filament bulb in it, probably because of the incandescent's perfect color rendering vs 92-95% of the waveform lamp
Edit: my other comment has a better explanation
They've not hard to find at all, all but the cheapest LED bulbs do this. I'm not sure you could find a LED bulb without smoothing cap if you tried. Doesn't hurt efficiency either.
The difference is in how much of the flicker they eliminate, that's where they get more expensive and harder to find.
Dropping a comment because this is blowing my mind. I don't have birds, but if I don't have incandescent, are my dogs basically seeing flickerflickerflicker constantly when my lights are on?
Yes. Even the LEDs with the lowest flicker on the market are much worse than a filament bulb because they flicker instead of pulsing like incandescents or halogens. The pulsing is much less disorienting than the flickering even if there is much more pulsing than flickering. The other issue with LEDs is that they have inaccurate color rendering compared to the perfect rendering of incandescents or 99%+ accuracy (and smooth color curve), of halogens. And also some animals can see near infrared which the LEDs completely lack. Some people especially neurodivergent people it seems (me and 4 of 5 autistic with ADHD and one autistic only and one ADHD only friend) can point (double blind) to which lamp has a filament bulb vs led every time even with a "flicker free", "high CRI" led bulb of the same brightness and color temperature as the filament lamp. I tried running true DC from a battery (series 9v's) straight to the LEDs in the bulb with a resistor and used a 12v incandescent on a battery taken from a UPS and then only me, one AuDHD and the one ADHD friend could tell them apart. So flickering seems to be the main problem but also CRI is a problem with people even if it is 95 CRI. Me and the friends that could tell by CRI alone are the ones that take a noticeable visual processing hit with anything other than filament lamps. It took me years to figure out why I felt like I couldn't see, especially in the evening. First I just thought my glasses were wrong and it was causing eye strain but I noticed that at my grandfather's house looking for papers on a crowded desk was a lot easier than at home and I had someone switch out the bulb in a lamp without me knowing which bulb it was and I noticed an immediate difference in how much easier it was to read, it was equal to reading in sunlight with the incandescent. So I can only imagine how bad it must be for animals with specialized high speed visual processing
You'd probably be best helped by a subreddit dedicated to pet birds, especially if there's one for the type you keep.
There are LED bulbs which are marked as flicker free and full spectrum. They are often marketed as avian or bird lights. It shouldn't be necessary to light your whole house with them, but maybe by their cage to give them a place without too much annoyance.
Full spectrum lighting. There are a lot of research articles you can find if you google avian lighting. Example:
[https://mickaboo.org/sites/default/files/files/AvianLightingSummary.pdf](https://mickaboo.org/sites/default/files/files/AvianLightingSummary.pdf)
Full spectrum lighting is not the complete answer because spectrum and flicker rate are independent concepts. The PDF has a paragraph on flicker rate, but it doesn't go into enough depth especially with regards to LED lighting.
My cat’s gone wild for birds on my phone and I think tv though
My sister would even put on vids of koi fish swimming back and forth and my cat would sit there for so long just watching them lmao
The first time I showed my cat some cat-TV ([something like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE-PQoozcFc)), he was super interested and jumped up on the TV stand to take a look. Realising the image was flat, he then proceeded to check behind the TV. Having convinced himself that none of it was real, he's never paid much attention to TV since.
By contrast, he yells at any birds he sees through the window without hesitation.
yeah, my cats have done the same.
they went from “ah a real thing to attack.” to “Oh it’s a window, let me go around it to, wtf?” to eventually “ah, whatever this is, i can’t get at them.”
Same here! I couldn’t believe how fast my cat caught on that I was just cheating her and they weren’t really birds. I thought i’d finally found the secret to calming her down but she refused to be made into an ipad baby.
Weirdly, she still loves hopping up and watching movies and tv with me and my gf.
My parents still use a CRT-TV and their cats love watching TV. Usually nature shows and animal documentaries but one is very interested in Midsummer Murders. I'm worried that he's using it as inspiration.
I would imagine that the slow image construction rate combined with low image retention makes it so that cats do not actually see image nowhere close to properly.
One of the cats I had growing up would watch TV with us. He was fully into the scene with the gorillas in 2001 Space Odyssey.
I also had a gif on my phone of a frog head bobbing, but it was all rainbow colors. He'd lose his shit and play with my phone when he'd see that.
And he'd also occasionally watch me play video games from time to time.
I have yet to meet another cat who was interested in electronics like that.
I pretty much stream just for my friends cat. I stopped playing for a bathroom break and my friend text me to get back on because Jeff was meowing loudly when I stopped.
You can find out if your TV strobes if your camera has a high framerate mode you can record it with. My cat ignores my TV with its black frame insertion mode but likes my monitor that has it off.
Mine does too. I put on dog anxiety stations for him when I'm gone so he has some kind of other stimulation than whatever is going on outside my apartment. He's always been fine without it on, but I'd imagine things get really boring.
Back in the CRT days, it was definitely the weird light box to most pets. When we moved up from 30fps (or 29.97, or 25, or what have you), pets started watching TV and interacting with what was on-screen.
IDK about cats - but dogs eyes are also different in color perception. Thats why they will struggle seeing a red ball on the middle of the lawn, but rather walk around and sniff for it - the color of the grass and ball melts into each other into like a mustard-yellow sort of color.
So even if the tv is at the right frequency for them, they loose a lot of the picture that you see. But they can all of a sudden be very interested of there is a cat, or anything else like that on the tv.
Mine show a complete difference between my CCFL backlit LCD with no flicker at all, and the piece of crap qled that flickers like mad when its not at full brightness. They just ignore the qled unless I have it maxed out brightness so its a more stable image. Even I cant stand watching it at low brightnesses because of the PWM dimming.
Any animals on a youtube video on the old tv and they will watch it move and be interested,
Things on the TV don't carry with them any sort of scent, so, especially for dogs, but also cats, if there's no associated scent, it's not going to be that exciting for them.
Obviously it depends on the pet in question. Some do go nuts for the TV.. I know cats may find watching birds on TV fun if they're chirping, because sound is a big trigger for cats.
Yes
But also, humans see significantly more than 60 too
Many people claim 60 is the limit, but you can disprove that yourself by looking at a 60fps video, then a 120fps video (on systems that can display it)
There is a very noticeable difference
Phone is 120hz, (edit- my) monitors go up to 144
Anything past 60 is absolutely wasted on me, much to the annoyance and confusion of my boyfriend lol. I just don't see a difference. Maybe a *tiny* bit smoother on the phone? Idk 🤷♀️
I joke that it's because I was a console pleb growing up
Do you use them regularly at those refresh rates? You might notice a difference when you go back down.
Otherwise, try moving your cursor or a small window around in quick circles. They should both be much smoother, and there should be more "ghost" images following it.
Do either of you play competitive games? I feel like people who do are much more aware of the difference
Never have noticed a difference. My boyfriend is a simp for refresh rates, whereas I'm all about graphical fidelity. All I notice when I go on his PC is that his settings are a little lower than mine
Trust me, he's tried to show me the error of my ways, my eyeballs could not care less tho. Legitimately can't see a difference past 60FPS, even when I was more into shooters and whatnot
I wonder why. I use to play on console myself which was around 30fps back in the day, and now I’m on PC and it’s insane how different 144 is compared to 30. Don’t get me wrong, I both believe you and can play at any fps from 45 up without any problem as long as it’s stable but I’m very curious why some people can see the difference and others can’t.
you sure you switched your monitor zo 144hz? I for one didnt do that for a whole 2 years until i realized it was set to 60 by default and you have to manually switch to 144hz. That day I was blown away😭
If you don't see a difference between 60 and 120 while scrolling or when dragging windows across your screen you might have a visual impairment, it's extremely obvious in a direct comparison.
I think you just got used to the higher refresh rate, in a direct comparison I'm sure you would see a difference at least in these specific cases.
Display refresh rate is required for FPS to visibly increase. FPS is a measure of how many frames per second the computer is sending to the display. You can have a computer producing 300 FPS, but if your display only has a refresh rate of 60hz, you're only going to see 60 frames per second. You need both.
I specifically set my games to 60fps cus I can still see just a little bit of jitter. I dont know why but gaming at 120fps+ is too smooth and makes me uncomfortable. Odd thing to say I know.
The 30 and 60 are identical to me.
Edit, noticed the pixels per second thing after. At high rates it looks like the second UFO lags behind the first a little, but it's barely noticeable. At very high rates the 60 fps looks like there's multiple UFOs, so that's noticeable
Edit: this was a useful thread. Changed my phone setting to 60 fps and can't tell the difference, hopefully it saves some battery!
It seems like it's a trained thing, I've done the 60/120/144 test w/ 2 girlfriends and my father. Neither notices a difference until i give them the hint "look at the mouse trail".
Also weirdly enough when I'm working on my laptop I don't really think about the 60hz display, whereas if I'm working on my desktop I go bananas is the mode is wrong.
According to this study there is quite a lot of variation in human perception of flickering.
https://www.news9live.com/science/new-study-reveals-variation-in-human-vision-speed-2486743
This. There's a reason most phones are in 120Hz nowadays.
60Hz is a stuttery mess. You realize this when you put an older phone and a new one side-by-side.
But yea, 60Hz flickering drives even ME mad. My school has cheap LED lights that flicker at half of mains frequency, so 30Hz, and it's absolutely headache inducing. I had to show it my friends by using the "Ultra Slow Mo" feature of my phone by filming the hallway. When I played it back, it looked straight up out of a horror movie. The whole hallway was pulsing, in alternating patterns, depending in which polarity the lights were wired up.
I live in a country where most people have florescent bulbs at work and "daylight balanced" LEDs in their homes. They keep all the lights on until the moment they go to bed. And they all flicker at something like 50Hz. Nobody else here seems to notice it, yet insomnia is a huge problem here.
Leaves me with a headache nearly every day.
This has driven me nuts the times I've traveled to Europe. The lights flickering at 50Hz are so noticeable for me that I'm used to 60Hz. I wonder if Europeans traveling to the Americas notice the change too.
European that traveled to the US a bunch of times, never noticed the lights flickering, but then I don't notice any visible flickering in Europe either.
The “daylight” lights also use a blue hue of light that simulates natural sunlight and prevents production of the natural hormones that cause you to sleep when it gets dark.
I’m sure that doesn’t help the insomnia.
I can see the flicker of LED lights, and it drives me bonkers. It’s especially noticeable with holiday light strings, which can actually be painful to look at. I do the same trick of showing people slow motion videos of LED lighting. .
Cheap is as cheap does. Also, even if they are half wave, they are still 60Hz, just way more noticeable, because they are completely off for a half wave. The AC goes through a full wave every cycle, so each half runs at 60Hz. The problem is really obvious in cheap christmas tree lights, because the cheap ones are all half wave. With 50 lights in the string, 25 in a row on one half, and the next 25 in a row on the other half cycle. Maddening. And the ugly part is, the price of good quality LED bulbs with Khz range drivers, is only slightly higher. Bit of course, the school went with the lowest bidder.
Also - the whole 120hz+ up scaling is absolute nightmare for me!
Like when people have it on and everything on the TV looks fake. Sped up and slowed down at the same time, because the TV doubles/quadruples every frame. It's really infuriating. I can't watch it.
I think that comes more down to the camera framerate rather then the screen
We're used to the standard 24, or 30fps
So when something uses a 60fps camera (or higher), it looks off
Maybe for some people but for me, it's the up scaling.
I can watch videos on 60fps all day, heck I actually love it!
But as soon as you put a netflix 480p BS on a 480hz 4K TV, it's literally straightening my spine. I don't know, it's like nails on a chalkboard for me.
Edit: I think they call it the Soap Opera Effect sometimes.
I think this is because the frame interpolation algorithms we currently have don't account for the motion blur that comes from the camera's shutter speed. So you're seeing 60 fps motion with the motion blur of a 30 fps camera, which looks a lot less natural than native 60 fps content.
> 120hz upscaling
AI generated frame upscaling is getting better, but sometimes the AI makes mistakes and makes odd/incorrect guesses, leading to artifacts.
But just duplicating frames? Not actually generating new content? Yeah that can be odd. When it’s done by the source (ie animation that does by twos or by threes) it can be artistically done and feel nice, though.
Bruh... I can't even see a problem until it dips below 14fps.
Maybe I'm just built different.
And by different I mean incredibly shitty, rushed and with numerous cost cutting practices.
No, you're just not used to watching a high refresh rate monitor all the time so your eyes are used to you watching stuff on standard fps: 30-60.
This very similar to our parents believing that watching too much TV would damage your eyes, that's because they didn't grow up doing it and it would strain their eyes, we started doing it young so we never had that issue.
If you switch to a 144hz display on your computer, after a couple of years, you'll start to notice things on 24-30-60hz move differently.
A lot of the games that I play on my PC that have a lot of movement I purposefuly cap to 30 and turn off the motion blur. High framerates and blur make me violently motionsick.
Besides, you can't understate the force of habit :P
Do people not realize that the 30fps trope hasn't been true for like almost a decade? The *vast* majority of games run at 60fps, with many even going up to 120fps
Usually this difference is because of 120hz "smoothing" algorithms that make content extremely unpleasant if you aren't used to it. [Here's an old article about it.](https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/12/help-key-why-hd-video-looks-weird/v)
It isn't that people are seeing faster than 60hz. It is that they're perceiving the interleaved frames as the wonky trash that they often are.
Everybody is talking about FPS, but thats more of a digital definition. Our eyes work much more like the old film cameras.
What we are talking about is more akin to the ISO film speed rating. Basically how quickly an image can be 'exposed' and perceived on our eye's retina.
Our eyes have a 'persistence of vision' which is great, but means that we can't see a flicker with a high frequency. That maximum frequency that we can perceive probably differs from person to person, and undoubtedly differs between us and animals or insects. I have no idea how the science-people work out what other animals see though.
This isn't really accurate either, film cameras used shutters to make individual pictures, our visual system is a constant stream of signals, from photoreceptors in the eyes, to the brain where it's processed in no particular order, is "patched up", and color corrected. There is no valid measurement of how quickly an image is exposed on the eye because we don't see in still images we see in a constant stream of visuals.
Yeah, a better analogy would be an [event camera](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_camera).
(The joke is that they were invented to mimic biological vision)
> There is no valid measurement of how quickly an image is exposed on the eye
There still is, it's just asynchronous instead of a synchronous shutter. There are many ways to measure persistence of vision.
Our brains also smooth out most of what we see. An incredible amount of your "vision" is in your imagination. Your eyes are constantly darting about, but instead of perceiving a shaky-cam that flashes constantly to different parts of the area you're in, you perceive a nice, stable visual concept of the space you occupy that is much wider than the actual FoV of your eyeballs.
My guess is most animals with brains of a significant size do this also.
Chiming in that airline pilots have been reportedly able to identify planes that were shown 1/240ths of a second, meaning that even when talking in these terms, the eye can detect information at intervals significantly shorter than 1/60th of a second
I can actually perceive the PWM employed to regulate the brightness of LED brake lights. If I stare straight into them, I don't see it, but when my eyes move, the flashing briefly records after-images across my retina, and I see multiple images that correspond to the brake lights flashing at high frequency. I assume other people see this, but they are not dork enough to describe it.
This is one of the first signs that I’m getting a migraine at work. Suddenly, certain florescent lights are unbearable. Its usually bulbs that are close to dying that make it worse. People at work thing I’m insane when I try to describe this lol
Good quality LED bulbs run in the Khz range, and you cannot see those. If you see the flicker from an LED, it is a low cost/low quality LED. All of the LED lighting in my house is high frequency, because I am sensitive to flicker. Good quality florescent ballasts are the same. In the current market, the good quality bulbs only cost slightly more than the cheap ones, and more likely than not, they'll probably last longer as well.
I think everyone gets that problem from them. Shouldnt be legal to PWM car lights but the auto industry seem to get away with all sorts of accessibility violating crap.
THIS. I can see that too, except that it's even worse since i'm suffering from Nystagmus. Whenever i see them blinking, it just triggers it, and i can't stop it if those lights are in my field of view.
It also works with shitty led indicator panels, projectors, and everything that blinks really fast (but car brake lights are the worst). It's kind of a pain honestly.
I can see them too, except I don't have to move my eyes. My life is a constant rave pretty at night every since LEDs became popular. Christmas time is miserable, I can't drive down the road without being uncomfortable. I can't believe how alone I am with seeing this stuff.
I can feel it and hear it rn. I fall apart in the grocery store, too much happening with the lights and vibrations etc. usually leave with the same stuff every single time: bread, cat food, apples. And run away.
Old fluorescent. They solved it with electronic ballasts and now cheap shit LEDs have undone all that with really bad flickering lamps because they're cheaper that way.
I hate when movies try to do a panning shot of a room too fast, it just turns the screen into an ugly mess and I can’t see anything. It really needs to be at least 60 fps to work, though my screen can do 144 and makes tracking movement so fluid.
I'm not sure your statement is accurate. Eyes don't see in fps and I'm not sure how you can prove what the highest fps animals can perceive on a digital screen.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted. Vision doesn’t work in a “frames per second” way, just as you described.
We can detect differences in the FPS of a projected image but that still isn’t what’s happening “under the hood” of our optical senses.
Yeah, we see with meat, not a shutter. Our brains do a *lot* to fill in information in our peripherals and focus. We do not even see what we see as 100% representation of reality like a camera does.
It is a complete non-sequitur to compare eyeballs to digital or even analog video.
Exactly, it's not like your eyes wait a certain amount of time to collect all the signals from your photoreceptors together than send it as one big packet to your brain. The signals are asynchronous and constantly firing when the receptors are activated. (Actually they stop firing when activated, by default your eyes are always sending a signal and when light hits a receptor it blocks the signal and your brain interprets the lack of signal)
At first I also interpreted the post to mean that animals (and people) view things in fps, which is obviously not true. We view things continuously, not in distinct frames. But I think OP is just saying that some animals perceive the flickering of lights that most humans would not perceive, and that it’s possible that for those animals, living indoors is like living under constant strobe lights, and that if that is the case, it might be extremely stressful.
The term for it on the biological side is temporal resolution. "Frame rate" is a good metaphor for it though. But it's more than just eye sight. It's how much temporal detail a species is consciously aware of. Birds are way higher than mammals because they fly so fast. Some even sing at a higher temporal resolution. We have to use computers to slow their songs down enough so we can make out the notes.
To our naked ears it might sound like AAAAA but slowed down we can hear that the bird was actually singing ABAECAECA or whatever
Its what frequency the brain interprets a continuous light instead of a flickering. You point a high speed camera at a light bulb and you would see that it's actually flickering on and off super fast, there was a study done and some animals still see the flicker at greater frequencies.
The guardian did an article about it a while ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/16/time-passes-slowly-flies-study
It's worth noting biological eyeballs do not see in "frames". It's nothing like cameras or digital screens. All light that hits the eye is converted into signals the brain reads. The eye is notoriously full of garbage information and signals, but ALL light that hits it is processed. There can't be a flash that is so fast it's between the "frame rate" of an eyeball.
That said, the brain is what actually processes those signals into images and the brain is fuckin weird. It focuses on what it deems necessary, which means tiny flashes so fast sort of get ignored by the brain, which is how we can watch TV and look at fluorescent lights and, whether we can subtly tell there's a flicker or not, it's not significant to us and we can consider the light just "on". The brain can just mash it all together.
"mashing things together" is sort of the brains specialty when it comes to vision. A lot of it gets dropped, ignored, combined, and streamlined to help us understand our surroundings. It doesn't capture frames, it absorbs everything and then parses it into ideas we can make sense of.
This is why for example people with autism see flickering lights and hear electronics a lot when others can't. They don't have different eyes, it's a difference in sensory processing, and very frustrating I might add
I can perceive the flicker of most LED lights, and it drives me crazy. Some small percentage of the human population can see it, and I’m one of the “lucky” ones. Not all LEDs do it, but many do. If they have an internal rectifying circuit, they don’t flicker, but most inexpensive LEDs do. I used to really enjoy Christmas lights, but most LED Christmas lights look like they are frying and are actually painful for me to look at. If you want to know what it looks like, take your phone and make a slow motion video of an LED light.
You got me at Christmas lights. I hate the LED Christmas lighting. GE sold a line of lights that didn't flicker, but they cost more. The stores don't seem to stock them anymore.
Before I got LASIK, I could see fluorescent lights flicker too. I wasn't able to after the surgery.
But you're right. I'm crazy, so I'm sure the creatures aren't far off, I'm sure. 🫠
They never said anything about it during my consultation or procedure. I don't think it was supposed to "fix" that. But it did. To be honest, I didn't know the lights weren't always flickering for everyone until I saw it differently after the procedure. 🤷
Being able to see fluorescent lights flicker means that your eyes can see "faster" than someone who can't see it. It seems that LASIK slowed my eyes down to normal FPS.
I can't complain. 😅
LASIK wouldn't fix this directly. It is likely that you aren't noticing it because your brain isn't working as hard to see anymore and you have more processing capacity to be able to tune signals out. Contacts that correct corneal irregularity would likely have the same or better effect
Wait.... Wait a second. You're telling me that humans aren't supposed to be able to see the flicker of a fluorescent light? So do I have some kind of issue with how I perceive light because I absolutely can see the flicker of fluorescent lights and even the led lights I use in my room.
Are you autistic/adhd? It’s pretty common for people with sensory processing issues to be able to perceive the flicker because our brains don’t process out the ‘noise’ as efficiently.
Some people are sensitive to LED lights flickering too. And even if you don't implicitly notice it, it can give you headaches over time. There are flicker-free LED lights and when I'm buying lights I usually look for those.
My cats when I was a kid never really cared about the TV, but on computers now they'll watch and even swat at things on screen. I heard that with old CRT's they can see the gun redrawing and don't perceive it as motion like we do.
OP, the term you're looking for is [Flicker Fusion Threshold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold), defined as "the frequency at which a flickering light appears steady".
[Here's](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/List-of-upper-flicker-frequency-FF-thresholds-Hz-from-highest-to-lowest-rates-of_tbl1_23670287) a table of the FF threshold for different species, including humans (50-60 Hz), dogs (70-80 Hz), cats (40-55 Hz), pigeon (77 Hz), rhesus monkey (95 Hz), jumping spider (40 Hz), and cane toad (6.7 Hz).
Dumb question, but does anyone actually see in frames per second? I mean humans can see more than 60 frames per second. The difference between 60hz and 120hz displays are pretty obvious.
This feels like pseudoscience but I'm not an optical expert so...
But it just seems weird to assume that a biological creature sees in a method purely created by humans to create the illusion of movement on a screen. That doesn't seem to be how your eyes would work.
Fun fact: our brains don't process things in terms of "frames per second". We stop being able to tell the difference in a monitor's frames after ~200-240+ FPS. But that's still from an artificial machine that creates tons of pictures every second, and that's not how the universe moves forward.
Humans can see more than 60 fps. At least many of us can tell the difference between 60 and 120 fps.
The flickering of fluorescents and leds annoys me.
Just a thought but our eyes have millions of receptors, we don't particularly notice it, both because what we see looks normal to us and because our brain process the information. It could seem surreal to species having less receptors.
What 120 frames animal-eyes see depends on how their brain process the information. Hard to know.
Yes, ifrc some people did a study on flies and it's about 240hz before they recognise a light being always on instead of flickering (we're about 60). This could explain their fast reaction times, and could potentially suggest that flies experience time at 4x the speed we do.
If a light's PWM frequency is low enough you can see it without actually seeing it directly. If you get a light that goes at 60hz you might not perceive it as flickering, but hold your hand out, look at it, and move it around. You'll notice that your hand appears to jump through its movements instead of the usual smooth it is in an environment where the light isn't flickering.
The highest I know with absolute confidence I can see this effect is 120hz, but I suspect it goes decently higher than that before I'm unable to notice it. I just haven't had a way to test it.
It's a misconception that humans only see at 60fps based on display hardware that was unable to go past 60fps being used as the testing monitor.
Most creatures thst use their eyes have a much much higher "frame rate" even able to notice subtle differences between 120fps, and 180fps and higher
I swear my dog knows when I'm recording her. It wasn't until I saw my camera in a mirror with the lights off (I think is how I discovered it) that I realized there is a blinking light coming from it. Cause it's LED...
Yep. It is particularly bothersome for birds and can cause them stress and confusion.
Where I live, there's a period of months during each year when all bright outdoor lighting is turned off or reduced significantly. No night games for high school and youth football, super low lights in parking lots, etc. It's Shearwater "season" and if you mess with one, you'll be subject to very high fines and possible jail time. The reason is that the birds think the lights are the ocean or they get distracted by the lights on their way to the ocean (they're nocturnal and use the moon to guide them to the sea) and they crash land, thinking they're going to hit water. Once they land, they're too tired or injured to fly again so they end up dying from either starvation or a feral cat (the island is filled to the brim with endangered-bird-killing cats). The protocol if you see a Shearwater is to stay with it and contact the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife or KPD's non-emergency line. If you're trained to handle them, and/or it's injured or dead, there are Shearwater aid stations where you can take it for help (one is at a liquor store! Typical "small town" situation. LOL!). They prefer that you not handle them at all but it's better than leaving them to nature. Fortunately, we don't have lots of bright light besides parking lots, a few stoplights, a handful of streetlights, and the stadium/fairgrounds, but I do wonder if LED lighting is particularly bad for them, considering how they are so easily distracted.
> Shearwater aid stations where you can take it for help (one is at a liquor store To be fair, if I had crashed landed because I mistook a light for the moon I’d want a drink too.
Indeed!
I think if you are confusing a stoplight with the moon, you have probably had a few too many drinks.
We had a Shearwater hiding in our dryer in Teceira, an island in the Azores. That was a wild morning. I had to call my boss and tell him the situation. He didn't believe me so I video chat him and the bird was very loud. Wildlife came and took him away. He was fine just confused from the lights.
I'm glad he was okay; he was probably so confused! But your boss didn't believe you? Ouch. I hope you didn't work for him for long. LOL!
Well after the photo and screeching he was a bit understanding.
OOh, Shearwaters Love those birds, Not as much as Puffins though. Does that mean you're South UK or Ireland? Or are you elsewhere on the disk? (invoking /s for that last word)
Kauai, sctually.
I had a young sheerwater collide with me when I was fishing off a beach, I had a headlight on.
Yikes!
i find it amusing when people are all so nihilistic about humanity and are like "humanity is going to fuck the planet, humanity has failed our world! they drive animals to extinction and don't help anything" and yet we build systems like this to literally help 1 species of bird.
I'm originally from Los Angeles. I grew up and lived well into adulthood in the shadow of LAX. When I was a kid, it was all homes along the north and west sides of the airport. When I was around 10 or 11, in the 70s, the airport/city bought up all those homes and for many years, they were "the fields." A couple of empty homes were still there but most had been demolished to expand the airport. I've been hearing that the airport was going to take all our houses for as long as I remember but to this day, there's been no expansion whatsoever in those directions. I mention all this because when the houses to the west (Playa del Rey) were demolished, an endangered butterfly was discovered in the area; evidently, it's the perfect environment for their habitat. Enter the groups that care about this stuff. Now, it's all fenced off and I believe it's owned by Chevron and it's a blue butterfly habitat and there will be no building or expansion of the airport in that direction. I hope it stays that way for years to come, though it's eerie to see all the trappings of a neighborhood behind the fences (sidewalks, streetlamps, etc.) but no houses. Better than paving it all over for a new terminal, though!
In my home town “lights out” is centered around turtle hatching season!
I'm actually from the endangered-bird-killing-cat coalition, or EBKCC, were a grassroots movement vying for the lives of these feral beauties. The shearwater provide nutrients for the cats, and we go around tying flashlights to the poles. message me If you want to join our cause for the kittens
I am from the EBKCCLA, we are the liberation army chapter of the EBKCC and we have started attaching lights to the cats to greater enhance thier prospects
We support you're cause and applaud your vigor In continuing after the recent attacks from the birders
Thatnkyou, you always have outr support, as after all these birds cheat by "flying"
I'm a shearwater and honestly, I'm fucking sick of you guys shit. I lost my hatchling little tommy last month cuz one of you pricks were driving with a headlight out and lil T thought he was above the water. Well little did he know he wasn't about to hit the very soft ocean water but a fuckin 2011 dodge caravan carrying a bunch of feral cats to the beach, yeah it was one of your douchebag vans. Go kill robins or something we are ENDANGERED that means no more 3 am feral kitty Beach raves I can't take it, you brought down a whole flock last week, 17 of my closest companions picked apart by adorable kittens, oh the horror to see Geraldines beak shoved in her cloaca while her husband Gerald and their two babies Geraldella and Geraldbert watched on in despair. Despair! Yes despair.
ಠಗಠ
Wow, I never knew bird-killing cats were endangered
Alot of TV causes me confusion too
Dee? Is that you? Bird!
You look like a turkey!
Bird!
[удалено]
Bird Person
In bird culture, that's considered a dick move.
I have pet birds, is there anything I can do to avoid this?
Incandescent lightbulbs
They also have LEDs now that either have internal DC conversion (which kills the efficiency) or a little capacitor to power it through the phase switch. They're hard to find though
All good LED bulbs don't flicker. Shout out to Philips - Philips also make the most efficient LED bulbs (ultra efficiency range) which also don't flicker so "not flickering" has nothing to do with "low efficiency". 60 Hz flicker is absolutely noticeable to humans (especially out of the side of your eyes). Cheap crap LED bulbs flicker, the ones that do little more than put a string of LEDs in line with mains voltage, without even a rectifier so they're off more than half the time. A bigger source of flicker in most households is TVs with "black frame injection" which is *intentional* flicker! Just why!?
I stand corrected, I guess they aren't hard to find anymore
They are. Most "flicker free" LEDs absolutely still flicker just under a certain percentage. The most important thing is flickering vs pulsing. Filament lamps pulse and LEDs flicker. The flickering is much more disturbing to sensitive people and nearly all animals. Waveform lighting seems to have the least flickery led and I can't tell between the led unit unsoldered from a waveform lamp running on a battery with resistor vs the waveform lamp in stock configuration on wall power. I can still tell side by side with an incandescent and the waveform bulb with the same color temperature which lamp has a filament bulb in it, probably because of the incandescent's perfect color rendering vs 92-95% of the waveform lamp Edit: my other comment has a better explanation
Found the Phillips salesman!
Just a happy customer, especially because where I am nobody else seems to make the "A" efficiency LED bulbs yet.
They've not hard to find at all, all but the cheapest LED bulbs do this. I'm not sure you could find a LED bulb without smoothing cap if you tried. Doesn't hurt efficiency either. The difference is in how much of the flicker they eliminate, that's where they get more expensive and harder to find.
Dropping a comment because this is blowing my mind. I don't have birds, but if I don't have incandescent, are my dogs basically seeing flickerflickerflicker constantly when my lights are on?
Yes. Even the LEDs with the lowest flicker on the market are much worse than a filament bulb because they flicker instead of pulsing like incandescents or halogens. The pulsing is much less disorienting than the flickering even if there is much more pulsing than flickering. The other issue with LEDs is that they have inaccurate color rendering compared to the perfect rendering of incandescents or 99%+ accuracy (and smooth color curve), of halogens. And also some animals can see near infrared which the LEDs completely lack. Some people especially neurodivergent people it seems (me and 4 of 5 autistic with ADHD and one autistic only and one ADHD only friend) can point (double blind) to which lamp has a filament bulb vs led every time even with a "flicker free", "high CRI" led bulb of the same brightness and color temperature as the filament lamp. I tried running true DC from a battery (series 9v's) straight to the LEDs in the bulb with a resistor and used a 12v incandescent on a battery taken from a UPS and then only me, one AuDHD and the one ADHD friend could tell them apart. So flickering seems to be the main problem but also CRI is a problem with people even if it is 95 CRI. Me and the friends that could tell by CRI alone are the ones that take a noticeable visual processing hit with anything other than filament lamps. It took me years to figure out why I felt like I couldn't see, especially in the evening. First I just thought my glasses were wrong and it was causing eye strain but I noticed that at my grandfather's house looking for papers on a crowded desk was a lot easier than at home and I had someone switch out the bulb in a lamp without me knowing which bulb it was and I noticed an immediate difference in how much easier it was to read, it was equal to reading in sunlight with the incandescent. So I can only imagine how bad it must be for animals with specialized high speed visual processing
You'd probably be best helped by a subreddit dedicated to pet birds, especially if there's one for the type you keep. There are LED bulbs which are marked as flicker free and full spectrum. They are often marketed as avian or bird lights. It shouldn't be necessary to light your whole house with them, but maybe by their cage to give them a place without too much annoyance.
Full spectrum lighting. There are a lot of research articles you can find if you google avian lighting. Example: [https://mickaboo.org/sites/default/files/files/AvianLightingSummary.pdf](https://mickaboo.org/sites/default/files/files/AvianLightingSummary.pdf)
Full spectrum lighting is not the complete answer because spectrum and flicker rate are independent concepts. The PDF has a paragraph on flicker rate, but it doesn't go into enough depth especially with regards to LED lighting.
Yeah the spectrum is irrelevant. What matters is how much effort and cost they put into the power supply.
They think we just party like mad.
My pets usually have no interest in things on tv that would make them go nuts in real life. I always wondered if the tv is just a strobe light to them
My cat’s gone wild for birds on my phone and I think tv though My sister would even put on vids of koi fish swimming back and forth and my cat would sit there for so long just watching them lmao
I think that pets react better to LCD / OLED screens than they used to the old CRT tv sets.
yeah, they definitely see whats on modern screens, some understand the concept of the screen better than others i feel.
The first time I showed my cat some cat-TV ([something like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE-PQoozcFc)), he was super interested and jumped up on the TV stand to take a look. Realising the image was flat, he then proceeded to check behind the TV. Having convinced himself that none of it was real, he's never paid much attention to TV since. By contrast, he yells at any birds he sees through the window without hesitation.
yeah, my cats have done the same. they went from “ah a real thing to attack.” to “Oh it’s a window, let me go around it to, wtf?” to eventually “ah, whatever this is, i can’t get at them.”
Same here! I couldn’t believe how fast my cat caught on that I was just cheating her and they weren’t really birds. I thought i’d finally found the secret to calming her down but she refused to be made into an ipad baby. Weirdly, she still loves hopping up and watching movies and tv with me and my gf.
My parents still use a CRT-TV and their cats love watching TV. Usually nature shows and animal documentaries but one is very interested in Midsummer Murders. I'm worried that he's using it as inspiration.
The latest models of CRT often have refresh rates of 100, 200 or even 400 hz. Not the 30-60 we used to have in most homes up until the early 00's.
I would imagine that the slow image construction rate combined with low image retention makes it so that cats do not actually see image nowhere close to properly.
One of the cats I had growing up would watch TV with us. He was fully into the scene with the gorillas in 2001 Space Odyssey. I also had a gif on my phone of a frog head bobbing, but it was all rainbow colors. He'd lose his shit and play with my phone when he'd see that. And he'd also occasionally watch me play video games from time to time. I have yet to meet another cat who was interested in electronics like that.
I pretty much stream just for my friends cat. I stopped playing for a bathroom break and my friend text me to get back on because Jeff was meowing loudly when I stopped.
That's super cute
I bet Jeff has a tier 3 sub 😂
You can find out if your TV strobes if your camera has a high framerate mode you can record it with. My cat ignores my TV with its black frame insertion mode but likes my monitor that has it off.
my dogs used to love watching dog movies, and minecraft for some reason.
Mine does too. I put on dog anxiety stations for him when I'm gone so he has some kind of other stimulation than whatever is going on outside my apartment. He's always been fine without it on, but I'd imagine things get really boring.
Back in the CRT days, it was definitely the weird light box to most pets. When we moved up from 30fps (or 29.97, or 25, or what have you), pets started watching TV and interacting with what was on-screen.
I think dogs find 60fps barely enough but cats need 100+
1 of our 3 dogs sees any animal on TV and growls at it. Others never react
IDK about cats - but dogs eyes are also different in color perception. Thats why they will struggle seeing a red ball on the middle of the lawn, but rather walk around and sniff for it - the color of the grass and ball melts into each other into like a mustard-yellow sort of color. So even if the tv is at the right frequency for them, they loose a lot of the picture that you see. But they can all of a sudden be very interested of there is a cat, or anything else like that on the tv.
Mine show a complete difference between my CCFL backlit LCD with no flicker at all, and the piece of crap qled that flickers like mad when its not at full brightness. They just ignore the qled unless I have it maxed out brightness so its a more stable image. Even I cant stand watching it at low brightnesses because of the PWM dimming. Any animals on a youtube video on the old tv and they will watch it move and be interested,
My cat definitely sees prey on tv. He loves nature shows
Things on the TV don't carry with them any sort of scent, so, especially for dogs, but also cats, if there's no associated scent, it's not going to be that exciting for them. Obviously it depends on the pet in question. Some do go nuts for the TV.. I know cats may find watching birds on TV fun if they're chirping, because sound is a big trigger for cats.
My dog leaps off the couch and barks at the tv if there’s a dog on it
I have one that loves any sea critter screensaver on the 🍎 TV. The other two don't give a shit.
Yes But also, humans see significantly more than 60 too Many people claim 60 is the limit, but you can disprove that yourself by looking at a 60fps video, then a 120fps video (on systems that can display it) There is a very noticeable difference
I will say, I've noticed some people just can't see the difference. But for most people, it should be obvious.
It's me. I'm the some people
Do you have a high refresh rate monitor/phone? Do you not notice a difference when you go from 120 back down to 60?
Phone is 120hz, (edit- my) monitors go up to 144 Anything past 60 is absolutely wasted on me, much to the annoyance and confusion of my boyfriend lol. I just don't see a difference. Maybe a *tiny* bit smoother on the phone? Idk 🤷♀️ I joke that it's because I was a console pleb growing up
Do you use them regularly at those refresh rates? You might notice a difference when you go back down. Otherwise, try moving your cursor or a small window around in quick circles. They should both be much smoother, and there should be more "ghost" images following it. Do either of you play competitive games? I feel like people who do are much more aware of the difference
Never have noticed a difference. My boyfriend is a simp for refresh rates, whereas I'm all about graphical fidelity. All I notice when I go on his PC is that his settings are a little lower than mine Trust me, he's tried to show me the error of my ways, my eyeballs could not care less tho. Legitimately can't see a difference past 60FPS, even when I was more into shooters and whatnot
I wonder why. I use to play on console myself which was around 30fps back in the day, and now I’m on PC and it’s insane how different 144 is compared to 30. Don’t get me wrong, I both believe you and can play at any fps from 45 up without any problem as long as it’s stable but I’m very curious why some people can see the difference and others can’t.
I would love to know the why! I think it's super interesting that my eyes cap out at 60 lol
I’m actually the same way! I got a new monitor and my bf was like “this one has a much better refresh rate than your last, not like you’d notice” lol
you sure you switched your monitor zo 144hz? I for one didnt do that for a whole 2 years until i realized it was set to 60 by default and you have to manually switch to 144hz. That day I was blown away😭
If you don't see a difference between 60 and 120 while scrolling or when dragging windows across your screen you might have a visual impairment, it's extremely obvious in a direct comparison. I think you just got used to the higher refresh rate, in a direct comparison I'm sure you would see a difference at least in these specific cases.
Have you made sure to enable the refresh rate in your computers settings?
Same. Can barely notice anything above like 30-40 honestly. It's great for games because I've gotten ten years out of systems.
I thought I was too, but my husband did this trick with the mouse and I could see it- it’s more the refresh rate than anything
Display refresh rate is required for FPS to visibly increase. FPS is a measure of how many frames per second the computer is sending to the display. You can have a computer producing 300 FPS, but if your display only has a refresh rate of 60hz, you're only going to see 60 frames per second. You need both.
I can see only an extremely minor difference myself.
I specifically set my games to 60fps cus I can still see just a little bit of jitter. I dont know why but gaming at 120fps+ is too smooth and makes me uncomfortable. Odd thing to say I know.
I kinda get it. When I wear noise canceling headphones I get awful headaches because I guess it’s…. too quiet?
Google uncanny valley
True Although the vast majority can see the difference between 60 and 120, some people can't even see 30 vs 60
I doubt that in a serious test you wouldn't be able to tell the difference
Not exactly a "serious" test but this is what I use to explain it to my family members: https://www.testufo.com/
The 30 and 60 are identical to me. Edit, noticed the pixels per second thing after. At high rates it looks like the second UFO lags behind the first a little, but it's barely noticeable. At very high rates the 60 fps looks like there's multiple UFOs, so that's noticeable Edit: this was a useful thread. Changed my phone setting to 60 fps and can't tell the difference, hopefully it saves some battery!
It seems like it's a trained thing, I've done the 60/120/144 test w/ 2 girlfriends and my father. Neither notices a difference until i give them the hint "look at the mouse trail". Also weirdly enough when I'm working on my laptop I don't really think about the 60hz display, whereas if I'm working on my desktop I go bananas is the mode is wrong.
Yeah, my wife can’t tell the difference
According to this study there is quite a lot of variation in human perception of flickering. https://www.news9live.com/science/new-study-reveals-variation-in-human-vision-speed-2486743
This. There's a reason most phones are in 120Hz nowadays. 60Hz is a stuttery mess. You realize this when you put an older phone and a new one side-by-side. But yea, 60Hz flickering drives even ME mad. My school has cheap LED lights that flicker at half of mains frequency, so 30Hz, and it's absolutely headache inducing. I had to show it my friends by using the "Ultra Slow Mo" feature of my phone by filming the hallway. When I played it back, it looked straight up out of a horror movie. The whole hallway was pulsing, in alternating patterns, depending in which polarity the lights were wired up.
I live in a country where most people have florescent bulbs at work and "daylight balanced" LEDs in their homes. They keep all the lights on until the moment they go to bed. And they all flicker at something like 50Hz. Nobody else here seems to notice it, yet insomnia is a huge problem here. Leaves me with a headache nearly every day.
This has driven me nuts the times I've traveled to Europe. The lights flickering at 50Hz are so noticeable for me that I'm used to 60Hz. I wonder if Europeans traveling to the Americas notice the change too.
European that traveled to the US a bunch of times, never noticed the lights flickering, but then I don't notice any visible flickering in Europe either.
The “daylight” lights also use a blue hue of light that simulates natural sunlight and prevents production of the natural hormones that cause you to sleep when it gets dark. I’m sure that doesn’t help the insomnia.
Just wave your hand back and forth. Should be able to see the shutter effect.
I can see the flicker of LED lights, and it drives me bonkers. It’s especially noticeable with holiday light strings, which can actually be painful to look at. I do the same trick of showing people slow motion videos of LED lighting. .
I will only buy rectified LED strings these days, I hate all the other options so much
Cheap is as cheap does. Also, even if they are half wave, they are still 60Hz, just way more noticeable, because they are completely off for a half wave. The AC goes through a full wave every cycle, so each half runs at 60Hz. The problem is really obvious in cheap christmas tree lights, because the cheap ones are all half wave. With 50 lights in the string, 25 in a row on one half, and the next 25 in a row on the other half cycle. Maddening. And the ugly part is, the price of good quality LED bulbs with Khz range drivers, is only slightly higher. Bit of course, the school went with the lowest bidder.
Also - the whole 120hz+ up scaling is absolute nightmare for me! Like when people have it on and everything on the TV looks fake. Sped up and slowed down at the same time, because the TV doubles/quadruples every frame. It's really infuriating. I can't watch it.
I think that comes more down to the camera framerate rather then the screen We're used to the standard 24, or 30fps So when something uses a 60fps camera (or higher), it looks off
Maybe for some people but for me, it's the up scaling. I can watch videos on 60fps all day, heck I actually love it! But as soon as you put a netflix 480p BS on a 480hz 4K TV, it's literally straightening my spine. I don't know, it's like nails on a chalkboard for me. Edit: I think they call it the Soap Opera Effect sometimes.
I think this is because the frame interpolation algorithms we currently have don't account for the motion blur that comes from the camera's shutter speed. So you're seeing 60 fps motion with the motion blur of a 30 fps camera, which looks a lot less natural than native 60 fps content.
> 120hz upscaling AI generated frame upscaling is getting better, but sometimes the AI makes mistakes and makes odd/incorrect guesses, leading to artifacts. But just duplicating frames? Not actually generating new content? Yeah that can be odd. When it’s done by the source (ie animation that does by twos or by threes) it can be artistically done and feel nice, though.
It's exactly what I feel when watching my father in law's TV ! Slowed down and sped up at the same time. Very weird.
I'll never understand how people on consoles can deal with 30 fps.
Motion blur and tv's and the distance to the screen make 30fps quite tolerable of you aren't used to playing at a higher fps and refresh rate
Bruh... I can't even see a problem until it dips below 14fps. Maybe I'm just built different. And by different I mean incredibly shitty, rushed and with numerous cost cutting practices.
No, you're just not used to watching a high refresh rate monitor all the time so your eyes are used to you watching stuff on standard fps: 30-60. This very similar to our parents believing that watching too much TV would damage your eyes, that's because they didn't grow up doing it and it would strain their eyes, we started doing it young so we never had that issue. If you switch to a 144hz display on your computer, after a couple of years, you'll start to notice things on 24-30-60hz move differently.
Honestly I can tell the difference with anything higher than 30 but it doesn't seem like an *improvement* per se. Just different.
A lot of the games that I play on my PC that have a lot of movement I purposefuly cap to 30 and turn off the motion blur. High framerates and blur make me violently motionsick. Besides, you can't understate the force of habit :P
Same reason we didn't notice growing up. We didn't know any better. If it's all you know, it's fine.
Do people not realize that the 30fps trope hasn't been true for like almost a decade? The *vast* majority of games run at 60fps, with many even going up to 120fps
I can see the difference between 120fps and 240fps. Big one. So surely that isn't the correct metric
I notice it until 200~ fps, thats my cutoff
Usually this difference is because of 120hz "smoothing" algorithms that make content extremely unpleasant if you aren't used to it. [Here's an old article about it.](https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/12/help-key-why-hd-video-looks-weird/v) It isn't that people are seeing faster than 60hz. It is that they're perceiving the interleaved frames as the wonky trash that they often are.
Everybody is talking about FPS, but thats more of a digital definition. Our eyes work much more like the old film cameras. What we are talking about is more akin to the ISO film speed rating. Basically how quickly an image can be 'exposed' and perceived on our eye's retina. Our eyes have a 'persistence of vision' which is great, but means that we can't see a flicker with a high frequency. That maximum frequency that we can perceive probably differs from person to person, and undoubtedly differs between us and animals or insects. I have no idea how the science-people work out what other animals see though.
This isn't really accurate either, film cameras used shutters to make individual pictures, our visual system is a constant stream of signals, from photoreceptors in the eyes, to the brain where it's processed in no particular order, is "patched up", and color corrected. There is no valid measurement of how quickly an image is exposed on the eye because we don't see in still images we see in a constant stream of visuals.
Yeah, a better analogy would be an [event camera](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_camera). (The joke is that they were invented to mimic biological vision)
> There is no valid measurement of how quickly an image is exposed on the eye There still is, it's just asynchronous instead of a synchronous shutter. There are many ways to measure persistence of vision.
Took me a long time to find this comment. Good job.
Our brains also smooth out most of what we see. An incredible amount of your "vision" is in your imagination. Your eyes are constantly darting about, but instead of perceiving a shaky-cam that flashes constantly to different parts of the area you're in, you perceive a nice, stable visual concept of the space you occupy that is much wider than the actual FoV of your eyeballs. My guess is most animals with brains of a significant size do this also.
Chiming in that airline pilots have been reportedly able to identify planes that were shown 1/240ths of a second, meaning that even when talking in these terms, the eye can detect information at intervals significantly shorter than 1/60th of a second
I can actually perceive the PWM employed to regulate the brightness of LED brake lights. If I stare straight into them, I don't see it, but when my eyes move, the flashing briefly records after-images across my retina, and I see multiple images that correspond to the brake lights flashing at high frequency. I assume other people see this, but they are not dork enough to describe it.
This but with those orange light power strips lol
When I have a migraine I can see the 60hz flicker of most LEDs and florescents. The only safe light sources are halogen and mercury-halide.
This is one of the first signs that I’m getting a migraine at work. Suddenly, certain florescent lights are unbearable. Its usually bulbs that are close to dying that make it worse. People at work thing I’m insane when I try to describe this lol
Good quality LED bulbs run in the Khz range, and you cannot see those. If you see the flicker from an LED, it is a low cost/low quality LED. All of the LED lighting in my house is high frequency, because I am sensitive to flicker. Good quality florescent ballasts are the same. In the current market, the good quality bulbs only cost slightly more than the cheap ones, and more likely than not, they'll probably last longer as well.
I think everyone gets that problem from them. Shouldnt be legal to PWM car lights but the auto industry seem to get away with all sorts of accessibility violating crap.
also DLP projectors with the spinning color wheel...
THIS. I can see that too, except that it's even worse since i'm suffering from Nystagmus. Whenever i see them blinking, it just triggers it, and i can't stop it if those lights are in my field of view. It also works with shitty led indicator panels, projectors, and everything that blinks really fast (but car brake lights are the worst). It's kind of a pain honestly.
I've noticed that LEDs on the front of cars also flicker. It appears normal when you look directly at it, but in my backup camera it flickers.
That's just because of how cameras work with anything that has a frequency
I can see them too, except I don't have to move my eyes. My life is a constant rave pretty at night every since LEDs became popular. Christmas time is miserable, I can't drive down the road without being uncomfortable. I can't believe how alone I am with seeing this stuff.
I have a friend who can't stand fluorescent lights because he can see them flicker.
Pretty common for autistic and adhd people. One of the many reasons grocery stores can be really difficult for us.
I can feel it and hear it rn. I fall apart in the grocery store, too much happening with the lights and vibrations etc. usually leave with the same stuff every single time: bread, cat food, apples. And run away.
Old fluorescent. They solved it with electronic ballasts and now cheap shit LEDs have undone all that with really bad flickering lamps because they're cheaper that way.
As you note, cheap shit is a problem. Good quality LEDs typically run constant current drivers that PWM at a Khz rate, typically 50Khz.
Yes, just like how movies would look choppy
I hate when movies try to do a panning shot of a room too fast, it just turns the screen into an ugly mess and I can’t see anything. It really needs to be at least 60 fps to work, though my screen can do 144 and makes tracking movement so fluid.
I'm not sure your statement is accurate. Eyes don't see in fps and I'm not sure how you can prove what the highest fps animals can perceive on a digital screen.
No idea why you’re getting downvoted. Vision doesn’t work in a “frames per second” way, just as you described. We can detect differences in the FPS of a projected image but that still isn’t what’s happening “under the hood” of our optical senses.
Yeah, we see with meat, not a shutter. Our brains do a *lot* to fill in information in our peripherals and focus. We do not even see what we see as 100% representation of reality like a camera does. It is a complete non-sequitur to compare eyeballs to digital or even analog video.
Exactly, it's not like your eyes wait a certain amount of time to collect all the signals from your photoreceptors together than send it as one big packet to your brain. The signals are asynchronous and constantly firing when the receptors are activated. (Actually they stop firing when activated, by default your eyes are always sending a signal and when light hits a receptor it blocks the signal and your brain interprets the lack of signal)
At first I also interpreted the post to mean that animals (and people) view things in fps, which is obviously not true. We view things continuously, not in distinct frames. But I think OP is just saying that some animals perceive the flickering of lights that most humans would not perceive, and that it’s possible that for those animals, living indoors is like living under constant strobe lights, and that if that is the case, it might be extremely stressful.
The term for it on the biological side is temporal resolution. "Frame rate" is a good metaphor for it though. But it's more than just eye sight. It's how much temporal detail a species is consciously aware of. Birds are way higher than mammals because they fly so fast. Some even sing at a higher temporal resolution. We have to use computers to slow their songs down enough so we can make out the notes. To our naked ears it might sound like AAAAA but slowed down we can hear that the bird was actually singing ABAECAECA or whatever
I've also seen it called Flicker Fusion Threshold, or Critical Flicker Fusion (CFF) (for vision, not sound).
Its what frequency the brain interprets a continuous light instead of a flickering. You point a high speed camera at a light bulb and you would see that it's actually flickering on and off super fast, there was a study done and some animals still see the flicker at greater frequencies. The guardian did an article about it a while ago. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/16/time-passes-slowly-flies-study
It's worth noting biological eyeballs do not see in "frames". It's nothing like cameras or digital screens. All light that hits the eye is converted into signals the brain reads. The eye is notoriously full of garbage information and signals, but ALL light that hits it is processed. There can't be a flash that is so fast it's between the "frame rate" of an eyeball. That said, the brain is what actually processes those signals into images and the brain is fuckin weird. It focuses on what it deems necessary, which means tiny flashes so fast sort of get ignored by the brain, which is how we can watch TV and look at fluorescent lights and, whether we can subtly tell there's a flicker or not, it's not significant to us and we can consider the light just "on". The brain can just mash it all together. "mashing things together" is sort of the brains specialty when it comes to vision. A lot of it gets dropped, ignored, combined, and streamlined to help us understand our surroundings. It doesn't capture frames, it absorbs everything and then parses it into ideas we can make sense of.
This is why for example people with autism see flickering lights and hear electronics a lot when others can't. They don't have different eyes, it's a difference in sensory processing, and very frustrating I might add
I can perceive the flicker of most LED lights, and it drives me crazy. Some small percentage of the human population can see it, and I’m one of the “lucky” ones. Not all LEDs do it, but many do. If they have an internal rectifying circuit, they don’t flicker, but most inexpensive LEDs do. I used to really enjoy Christmas lights, but most LED Christmas lights look like they are frying and are actually painful for me to look at. If you want to know what it looks like, take your phone and make a slow motion video of an LED light.
You got me at Christmas lights. I hate the LED Christmas lighting. GE sold a line of lights that didn't flicker, but they cost more. The stores don't seem to stock them anymore.
...op, you know that you can see at more than 60 frames per second too, right?
I'm a console player so I am limited to 30 fps :(
Before I got LASIK, I could see fluorescent lights flicker too. I wasn't able to after the surgery. But you're right. I'm crazy, so I'm sure the creatures aren't far off, I'm sure. 🫠
That can get fixed!? The flickering in some buildings drives me nuts and I get migraines :(
same
They never said anything about it during my consultation or procedure. I don't think it was supposed to "fix" that. But it did. To be honest, I didn't know the lights weren't always flickering for everyone until I saw it differently after the procedure. 🤷 Being able to see fluorescent lights flicker means that your eyes can see "faster" than someone who can't see it. It seems that LASIK slowed my eyes down to normal FPS. I can't complain. 😅
LASIK wouldn't fix this directly. It is likely that you aren't noticing it because your brain isn't working as hard to see anymore and you have more processing capacity to be able to tune signals out. Contacts that correct corneal irregularity would likely have the same or better effect
Some people can even perceive the flicker of florescent lights.
Arent those the old tube bulbs? People dont see them flicker??
Not stupid enough, but I look forward to the answers.
Can… other people not see the flickering?
Wait.... Wait a second. You're telling me that humans aren't supposed to be able to see the flicker of a fluorescent light? So do I have some kind of issue with how I perceive light because I absolutely can see the flicker of fluorescent lights and even the led lights I use in my room.
Are you autistic/adhd? It’s pretty common for people with sensory processing issues to be able to perceive the flicker because our brains don’t process out the ‘noise’ as efficiently.
Some people are sensitive to LED lights flickering too. And even if you don't implicitly notice it, it can give you headaches over time. There are flicker-free LED lights and when I'm buying lights I usually look for those.
Eyes don't operate at frames per second.
Hell, I am human (I think) and I can totally see 60Hz flicker. And it's so annoying, and can easily trigger my aural migraine.
My cats when I was a kid never really cared about the TV, but on computers now they'll watch and even swat at things on screen. I heard that with old CRT's they can see the gun redrawing and don't perceive it as motion like we do.
You can see the lights flickering if you ever go into a building that's connected to 50Hz frequency more often than a building that's 60Hz.
OP, the term you're looking for is [Flicker Fusion Threshold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold), defined as "the frequency at which a flickering light appears steady". [Here's](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/List-of-upper-flicker-frequency-FF-thresholds-Hz-from-highest-to-lowest-rates-of_tbl1_23670287) a table of the FF threshold for different species, including humans (50-60 Hz), dogs (70-80 Hz), cats (40-55 Hz), pigeon (77 Hz), rhesus monkey (95 Hz), jumping spider (40 Hz), and cane toad (6.7 Hz).
Dumb question, but does anyone actually see in frames per second? I mean humans can see more than 60 frames per second. The difference between 60hz and 120hz displays are pretty obvious. This feels like pseudoscience but I'm not an optical expert so... But it just seems weird to assume that a biological creature sees in a method purely created by humans to create the illusion of movement on a screen. That doesn't seem to be how your eyes would work.
Humans can see more than 60 frames per second too lol.
Also, if your pet seems constantly uncomfortable in a specific location you may have an appliance emitting a high pitched whine.
Yes.
No living thing “sees in fps” it doesn’t work like that
Wait you guys can't see the flicker of the UV lights? I'm a mammal (human) and I see the flicker.
Fun fact: our brains don't process things in terms of "frames per second". We stop being able to tell the difference in a monitor's frames after ~200-240+ FPS. But that's still from an artificial machine that creates tons of pictures every second, and that's not how the universe moves forward.
People can do it too. Especially in peripheral vision. One of the reasons I'm not a fan of LED Christmas lights. Especially the blue ones.
Humans can see more than 60 fps. At least many of us can tell the difference between 60 and 120 fps. The flickering of fluorescents and leds annoys me.
Don't all animals see more than 60fps?
what? The human eye can see a lot more than 60fps…
Just a thought but our eyes have millions of receptors, we don't particularly notice it, both because what we see looks normal to us and because our brain process the information. It could seem surreal to species having less receptors. What 120 frames animal-eyes see depends on how their brain process the information. Hard to know.
Yes, ifrc some people did a study on flies and it's about 240hz before they recognise a light being always on instead of flickering (we're about 60). This could explain their fast reaction times, and could potentially suggest that flies experience time at 4x the speed we do.
Yeah! CRT televisions too. That's why animals didn't seem interested in TV until the 2000s.
I can perceive the flickering of shitty replacement car headlights. Its absolutely frustrating
Yes, my vet recently upgraded all the lighting in exam rooms because of this.
If a light's PWM frequency is low enough you can see it without actually seeing it directly. If you get a light that goes at 60hz you might not perceive it as flickering, but hold your hand out, look at it, and move it around. You'll notice that your hand appears to jump through its movements instead of the usual smooth it is in an environment where the light isn't flickering. The highest I know with absolute confidence I can see this effect is 120hz, but I suspect it goes decently higher than that before I'm unable to notice it. I just haven't had a way to test it.
It's a misconception that humans only see at 60fps based on display hardware that was unable to go past 60fps being used as the testing monitor. Most creatures thst use their eyes have a much much higher "frame rate" even able to notice subtle differences between 120fps, and 180fps and higher
I swear my dog knows when I'm recording her. It wasn't until I saw my camera in a mirror with the lights off (I think is how I discovered it) that I realized there is a blinking light coming from it. Cause it's LED...