006 - Compound Eye (NSFI)

(Not Safe For Iris)

Oh great, you can see the vote button!

Commentary

You probably know that many insects and most arthropods have what's called "compound eyes", consisting of thousands of connected "eye units" (ommatidia, singular ommatidium). What you may not know is that compound eyes have awful resolution, which can only be increased by having the ommatidia be larger in both size and number.

As this source (the relevant conclusion is on page 13) helpfully calculates, a compound eye would need a radius of 11.7 meters (consisting of millions of human-eyeball-sized ommatidia) in order to match the resolution of our non-compound ("simple") eyes.

I did take some artistic license, though: There was no way I could make the guy having two of these look good. He'll just have to live without depth perception. Oh, and he should be crushed under the weight of his own eyes, but who cares about that? Depth perception!