Frequently Asked Questions

Scrutinizer is a foveal vision simulator that shows designers and researchers what users actually see at a glance. It models the difference between foveal (sharp, central) and peripheral (blurry, desaturated) vision, helping you design for the scan rather than the screenshot.

Yes! The Scrutinizer Browser is completely free and open source under the MIT license. The Figma plugin is available now and has both free and premium tiers.

The Scrutinizer Browser is available for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel). Windows can be built from source (npm run build:win). Linux is on the roadmap. The Figma plugin works everywhere Figma runs.

Scrutinizer is grounded in peer-reviewed visual neuroscience — cortical magnification (Schwartz 1980, Blauch et al. 2026), spatial frequency decomposition via Difference-of-Gaussians, per-channel chromatic pooling (castleCSF), and feature congestion scoring (Rosenholtz 2007). Some perceptual phenomena — notably texture synthesis for crowding (mongrel textures, Freeman & Simoncelli 2011) — are approximated rather than fully simulated due to real-time performance constraints. Validated mechanisms: cortical magnification — spatial acuity report; chromatic pooling — color search report; feature congestion — validated at ρ=0.93 (v1.8); crowding geometry — reference stimuli. Our system paper (in preparation) details the full pipeline. See also the literature review.

The fovea is the tiny central region of your retina (about 2° of visual angle) where you have the highest concentration of cone photoreceptors. This is where you see fine detail and color. Everything outside the fovea—the periphery—has progressively lower resolution and color sensitivity.

Yes! The fovea radius is adjustable in the toolbar. You can also use our Foveal Calibrator to measure your actual biological fovea size based on your monitor distance and screen size.

Scrutinizer Browser is built on Electron and Chromium. It captures each frame of your browsing session and processes it through a WebGL shader pipeline that applies biologically-plausible visual degradation in real-time (60fps).

Absolutely! Scrutinizer is open source (MIT license), and we encourage academic use. The shader parameters are fully documented and customizable. We have a system paper in preparation (March 2026) — if you publish research using Scrutinizer, please cite it once available or reference the technical documentation in the meantime.

Scrutinizer processes every frame through a complex GPU shader pipeline. This requires continuous GPU work, which generates heat. On laptops, you may want to use an external monitor or reduce the window size for extended sessions.