How fast is Red Dead Redemption's dead eye?
Hey there, partner.
You know, this town ain't big enough for--
It's actually really big, nevermind.
The myth of the outlaw gunslinger wasn't all about
robbing train cars and threats based
on the population density of towns and tippin' hats.
What really made the gunslinger a myth was ultimate prowess
with a pistol.
Out here, if you're not fast, you're buzzard food.
But just how fast is fast?
If you had a real dead eye shot, how quick would you be?
The gunslinger with the fastest hands in the West
has been a trope in westerns for decades,
and in Red Dead Redemption, it rides again as
the dead eye ability, a way for the player to slow down time
and take the perfect shot.
It implies incredibly fast, seriously skilled movements.
Pop culture won't give us any hard and fast values though,
so what is the real limit to just how soon you could shoot.
First, if we wanna know just how quickly you can detect
and react to a stimulus, what we're really asking about
is the limit of human reaction time.
Scientists have been concerned with human reaction times
since before Red Dead Redemption took place.
120 years ago was when scientists first started
publishing studies on it.
We can be more specific.
We want to know how long it will take your brain to perceive
the environment, identify an object or stimulus,
decide on an action to take, and then issue a motor command
to your hands or whatever so you can take that action.
Because of this process, the human reaction time
is necessarily limited by the processing speed of the brain
and the time it takes for electrical signals to travel
throughout the body.
It's gettin' kinda dark out here.
Now to measure human reaction time, we have to come up
with good experiments.
So far, we have three main paradigms.
In simple reaction time tests, we asked study participants
to react simply to a stimulus, like pressing a button
if they see a flash of light.
In recognition testing, we asked study participants
to react to one stimulus, but not another.
Like pressing a button if you see a yellow flash of light,
but not a blue flash of light.
And in choice, we offer study participants up a choice
and they hit a button accordingly.
Now, scientists have found that across this testing,
the more complicated you get,
the longer the human reaction time.
As you go from simple to recognition to choice,
human reaction times get longer.
So the simpler the stimulus and your reaction to it,
the faster you're gonna be.
Man, it really is beautiful out here though.
(growls)
Across 120 years of reaction time testing,
scientists have found that not only does
the stimulus matter, its physical nature matters.
If I were to fire this gun, the light from that event would
hit the eye much, much faster than the sound from the event
would hit your ear.
But because the transduction of a photon into vision,
relatively speaking, takes a lot longer,
it's much more complicated than turning pressure waves
in your inner ear into sound.
You actually react to sound a lot quicker than you do
to something you see.
The human reaction time to auditory stimuli is, on average,
quite a bit faster than it is for visual stimuli,
with our response to touch somewhere in between
these millisecond values.
But these values here are still a bit on the fast side.
The most common figure you will see for human reaction time
in general, is somewhere around a quarter of a second
or 250 milliseconds.
The blink of an eye.
Now where is that horse?
(blows)
We don't want no stinking averages though.
We want the limit, gunslinger speed.
So let's put you to the test.
Why do they, bleh, why do they do that?
The easiest reaction time test that I know of is something
you can do at home right now.
All you need is a friend and a ruler.
My friend's name is Equestly.
Come here, girl, come on.
(neighs) There she is.
Beautiful.
Now once you have your friend and your ruler,
have that friend hold the ruler with the zero point
right above your fingertips.
Then when you are ready, have your friend randomly drop it
and then see how quickly you can catch it.
Alright, girl, come on.
There, once you've caught the ruler, take the distance
it took you to catch that ruler and write it down.
Do this experiment three to five times and then
take the average distance value.
Alright, girl, you can go.
(neighs)
So dramatic.
Because our ruler was in free fall under Earth's gravity
during this experiment, you can use the free fall equation
to get the time it took before you caught the ruler
in its fall, your reaction time.
I did this experiment myself beforehand, and I got
around 300 milliseconds average.
(neighs)
It's fine.
(neighs) (snorts)
I think it looks good.
If you want to really feel like a gunslinger though,
there's another reaction time test that you can do at home.
However, you have to watch this video on YouTube
on a desktop or laptop.
It's a hassle, I know, but it's for science.
Otherwise, just follow along.
Okay, so when you see me draw my gun, what I want you to do
is hit the space bar on your desktop or laptop
as quickly as you can.
Then on YouTube, you can use the comma key to go back
single frames in the video.
Do that until you see me put my gun back in its holster,
then maybe do it a couple of times, pausing the video,
and then take the average number of frames it took you
to hit that space bar.
Alright, are you ready?
Alright, get ready.
'Cause this town is, in fact, not big enough
for the two of us.
(eagle scream)
How'd you do?
My videos run at 24 frames per second.
So if you take your average number of frames and divide it
by 24, you will get your gunslinger reaction time,
reacting to me drawing on you.
And I hope that I really stacked up,
because this town is just not--
It is--
It's--
You know, it actually looks pretty nice.
I think we could both live here.
I'll stop being so ornery about it.
If you try these experiments with me a few times,
you probably notice the more you did the test,
the better your reaction times got.
Experience has a lot to do with it.
So it stands to reason that a seasoned gunslinger,
who has a lot of experience with duels and such,
would have trained their brain to react faster
than the average person.
And scientists have actually confirmed this effect
in modern gunslinging, competitive, first-person shooters.
In a study of reaction times across expert video game
players and non-video game players, authors of a study
in 2009 found that the video game players were, on average,
11% faster in their reaction times across nine
different tasks without a loss in accuracy.
And if you wanna see just how fast some gamers get,
here's a gamer named Flood, sniping bots
while playing Counter Strike.
His average reaction time in this video is just
180 milliseconds, equal to some of the best
visual reaction times period.
Now that's fast gamin'.
Experience and practice can reduce reaction times,
so now let's look at the humans whose job it is to react
as quickly as possible.
Your perceptual limits
should be at least
as fast
as Dead Eye would be.
What just happened?
Sorry, I'm just takin' a second to appreciate the graphics
in this open world.
And there's probably no unnecessary effects quest in it.
I'm sure of it.
In 2000, gunslinger Howard Darby set the world record
for the fastest draw and shot with a single-action revolver
like you might use in Red Dead Redemption.
As you can see, Darby is extremely fast.
Darby's world record shot took just 252 milliseconds,
but this was for the full shot.
He estimates that his reaction time during the shot
was closer to 145 milliseconds.
Unbelievably fast.
If you could see Red Dead Redemption's Dead Eye happening
in real life, it might look something like Darby.
Him reacting to, and taking out, multiple targets
in literally the blink of an eye.
(neighs)
Get back here.
Get back here, you dumb majestic beast.
It turns out that there's an interesting little quirk
to the reaction times of gunslingers.
If you are in a duel, it's actually faster to draw second.
A few studies now have found that if you put participants
into a gun duel-like scenario, and tell them to draw
on each other randomly, the person who draws second is,
on average, 10% faster in their reaction time.
Of course, just a few milliseconds probably isn't going
to always save your life in a gun duel, but feasibly,
drawing second could be the difference between going home
in one piece, and going home in a coffin.
(yells) (gun shots)
There it is.
There are even faster reactors than gunslingers.
Olympic sprinters.
Getting off of the line quickly during a race is
hugely important, so these athletes train themselves
to respond to a stimulus and react almost immediately.
During races, the Olympics considers any start off of
the line faster than 100 milliseconds to be a false start.
They figure that on average, humans can't react that quickly
and so if they do, they are either guessing,
making a mistake, or cheating.
The Olympics might be wrong though.
One recent study wanted to see if the hundred millisecond
rule was a good one and so they put Olympic athletes through
reaction time testing as accurate as they could make it.
And they found that at least one of the athletes that
they tested had an average reaction time of 87 milliseconds.
One athlete even started moving his arms
after 40 milliseconds.
Now Olympic sprinters are reacting to auditory cues
and not the visual ones that gunslingers use,
so they will be faster, but 40 milliseconds.
For context, this is what it sounds like when sounds
are placed 200 milliseconds apart.
(clicks)
And this is what it sounds like when those sounds are
just 50 milliseconds apart,
slower than this dude's reaction time.
(fast clicks)
Yeah, imagine reacting between those individual pulses.
From all of this, we can infer that you butt up against
the limit of human reaction time when you are 50% faster
or more than the average person.
This is where Dead Eye would be.
Whooo, oh.
So if Red Dead Redemption Dead Eye system
implies that the user can slow down and stretch out time
because they are in effect perceiving and reacting to events
with unbelievable quickness than the fastest this ability
could really be, is just a few times slower than the
electrical impulses ridin' around your body right now.
Gunslinging in half the time it takes for the average person
to even react to something, that's what would make you
the fastest gun in the West.
Because science.
(yells)
(upbeat music)
Even when you get down into the tens of milliseconds,
that's very, very fast for a human.
Like if you were able to shoot that quickly,
the other person doesn't have a chance.
But in terms of the animal kingdom's ability to react
to stuff, it's not even close.
We found a fly that can react to stimuli
in five milliseconds.
The electrical signals in our body don't travel fast enough
to even approach what this fly can do.
It's absolutely incredible.
Just imagine like reactin' to somethin' and just,
ho, come on.
Just not possible.
Too quick.
It's a real knee-slapper of a reaction.
Yo, ow.
Hey, thank you so much for watchin'.
If you did any of the experiments here today,
why don't you post your times in the comments.
Let's see just how fast you are, gunslinger.
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at Project Alpha dot com, where if you sign up now
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Thank you.