[HN Gopher] How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain
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How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain
Author : jahfer
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-01-22 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rustle.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (rustle.ca)
| michaelteter wrote:
| This is another +1 for WFH. Many office environments have
| terrible lighting, and there's very little you can do about it.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| The over-bright lighting, monitor glare, and eye strain are a
| favorite conversation topic at my workplace since RTO.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I remember standing up on office chairs to twist the florescent
| tube bulbs above my desk just enough to turn them off. That
| light was just awful.
|
| It helped a lot until maintenance would come in at night and
| "fix" the light and I'd have to do it all over.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Amen. I wear a ballcap at the office.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Ours are absolutely atrocious.
|
| I forgot just how bad it got until they did a big office move a
| couple of months ago. Previous to that I'd been way out on the
| edge with large windows behind me (with some shading film on
| them). My move now put me in the centre of the floor with
| barely a window in visible range, stuck under these godawful,
| far too bright lights.
|
| The first day in that space reminded me just how much I'd hated
| that aspect of things before the pandemic.
| Carrok wrote:
| > When it comes to light brightness, too much is just as
| problematic as too little
|
| Recently moved into a house with on/off light switches. Having
| the ceiling lights on full brightness was downright oppressive. I
| installed dimmer switches, and it's so much nicer it's hard to
| really convey.
| joelfried wrote:
| How do you source lightbulbs? I have yet to find a reliable LED
| bulb that doesn't hum or flicker on a dimmer despite being
| advertised as "dimmable" . . .
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| that's probably a problem with your dimmer switch, not the
| bulbs.
| gruez wrote:
| Explain. Isn't a dimmer switch just a variable resistor? Do
| you need fancy dimmer switches if you want them to work
| with LED bulbs?
| airblade wrote:
| A dimmer switch for an LED light is different from a
| dimmer switch for a non-LED light. If you try to use an
| LED light with a "normal" dimmer, it won't work well.
| aidos wrote:
| Not 100% sure of the details but I think it's more like a
| digital pwm system.
|
| I had dimmers installed when we rewired our house and I
| thought they were rubbish. Replaced those with Varilight
| v-pro and they were noisy. Discovered that I could switch
| between leading edge and trailing edge modes (or
| something like that) and the sound went away. Love them
| now.
| rb2k_ wrote:
| There's differences. e.g. MOSFET vs TRIAC
|
| Zooz (popular zwave manufacturer) has some interesting
| tidbits on their homepage.
|
| https://www.support.getzooz.com/kb/article/1103-zen72-vs-
| zen...
|
| "The ZEN77 Dimmer is recommended for 3-way and 4-way
| installations since you won't need to rewire your other
| switches in the set-up, you can simply replace the main
| switch with direct connection to power with the ZEN77
| dimmer.
|
| This model can control up to 100 Watts of LED bulbs but
| we don't recommend using it in installations with
| chandeliers or large groups of lights over 6 bulbs.
| Version 1.0 and 2.0 of the ZEN77 (700 series Z-Wave chip)
| were MOSFET dimmers so if your bulbs work better with
| trailing-edge (or reverse-phase) drivers, those versions
| of the model worked best. Version 3.0 of the ZEN77 (700
| series Z-Wave chip) is now a TRIAC dimmer so if your
| bulbs work better with leading-edge drivers, this model
| will work better. The 800 series version of the ZEN77 is
| also a TRIAC dimmer. Why We Changed to all TRIAC: We
| found that newer LED bulbs dimmed better with TRIAC
| dimmers, and considering limited availability for
| MOSFETS, we decided to transfer the ZEN77 model to TRIAC
| as well."
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If a dimmer switch were a resistor, it wouldn't work at
| all with LED lights (the AC->DC converters in them don't
| just lower the current they provide when the AC input
| gets lower).
|
| In incandescent lights, a variable resistor would burn a
| lot of power unnecessarily, so instead they use phase cut
| dimming (with a triac switch) where the dimmer cuts out a
| variable portion of the AC cycle. That way you reduce the
| effective duty cycle of the power without burning the
| energy. This works well for incandescents because the
| filament glow scales nicely with the with the power being
| delivered to the bulb. It works poorly with (some) LED
| bulbs because the turn on/off time is slow relative to
| the power cycle, and the LED brightness itself doesn't
| just scale nicely with the current from the rectifier.
| amluto wrote:
| A dimmer is either a "phase-cut" device, either
| (commonly) forward-phase/leading-edge or (less commonly)
| reverse-phase/trailing-edge. At all times, it's either on
| or off, and it cycles between on and off once per half
| wave, so it produces 120 pulses per second. A good-
| quality light fixture will smooth out that waveform and
| produce approximately constant output.
|
| The worst choice is a no-neutral-required forward-phase
| dimmer. Neutral-required forward-phase dimmers are
| usually better. Reverse-phase dimmers can be excellent
| for LEDs (but disastrous for magnetic transformers) and
| always require neutrals. Some dimmers can operate in both
| modes.
| myself248 wrote:
| Old-school dimmer switches were rheostats, and they got
| hot.
|
| Pretty much all dimmers now are TRIAC-based, which is a
| semiconductor that turns on partway through the AC wave,
| then turns off at the next zero-crossing, repeat. It
| chops the waveform so the light only gets power for a
| fraction of the time.
|
| An incandescent bulb works largely the same with either
| type. (You may hear the filament "sing" on a TRIAC dimmer
| since the fast-rising waveform edge has a lot of harmonic
| content, but this is usually very faint.)
|
| LED bulbs are non-dimmable by default. The typical job of
| a power supply is to ignore variations in the source and
| deliver uniform power to the load, and that's just what
| they do, driving the emitters at a constant brightness
| regardless of what the dimmer does, until it's letting
| through so little power that the poor thing just shuts
| off. Or flickers madly.
|
| Dimmable LED bulbs are actually super tricky, because the
| power supply has to measure the distortions in the
| incoming waveform, interpret that as a dimming command,
| and use that to control the output to the emitters. Any
| jitter in the measurement sampling means the resulting
| brightness will bounce around. Any jitter in the
| waveform, which an incandescent might've ignored as long
| as the area-under-the-curve was equal, might be picked up
| by the LED power supply and misinterpreted as a changing
| dimming level.
|
| It all sucks and we should abandon it immediately. LEDs
| should be driven with DC. But there's an awful lot of
| installed fixtures to keep us from that utopia.
| amluto wrote:
| You buy a bunch and try them. Philips is generally reliable,
| but their online catalog is often out of date or incomplete,
| and they change their SKUs all the time.
| boomskats wrote:
| Lutron test a lot of LED lights for compatibility with their
| dimmers - you can find the index here[0]. I can't imagine the
| performance of the LEDs listed is specific to Lutron dimmers.
|
| [0]: https://www.lutron.com/europe/Service-
| Support/Pages/Technica...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I actually "solved" the problem by using remote controlled
| light bulbs.
|
| I can still use the switch to turn them on and off, but I
| have to use the remote for dimming. Not the most elegant
| solution, but the dimming works flawlessly, and on my model I
| can also change the color temperature, which is nice, and it
| was actually cheaper than most "dimmable" light bulbs.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| For me the revolution was to get a rather expensive monitor [1]
| with a great reader mode that lessen the flicker considerably.
| When I game with it and I turn off reader mode my eyes really
| feel the difference even though I spend way less time gaming than
| working.
|
| I wonder if OLEDs will be even better since they shouldn't
| flicker during productivity (from what I read at least).
|
| [1] was one of the LG ultrawide 34" but it was a few years ago
| and can't find it anymore.
| wvenable wrote:
| It might be time for me to upgrade my monitors (they are very
| old). I never thought too much about flicker, etc. Does anyone
| have any good recommendations for just decent 24" monitors for
| coding?
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Not me, sorry. At the time I did watch a bunch of reviews on
| YouTube, but since the purchase I haven't kept up
| lawn wrote:
| I've been considering the "programmer" monitors from BenQ,
| but I don't know if they truly help.
|
| [0]: https://www.benq.com/en-
| us/monitor/programming/rd280u.html
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| If you've got the budget for it, e-ink monitors are becoming
| more available recently, and I've heard that they make a huge
| difference for eye strain. There are still only a few
| companies manufacturing panels that large, and I think the
| framerate can be pretty jarring for anything other than text,
| but I have been keeping an eye out for when the prices drop.
| homebrewer wrote:
| There shouldn't be any flicker in any mode if you avoid
| monitors that use PWM for backlight control (which anyone who's
| sensitive to flicker probably should do). I was stupid enough
| to buy one with low frequency PWM (didn't have money for
| anything else at that moment) and "solved" the problem by
| setting brightness to 100% (which sets duty cycle to 100%), but
| it destroyed image quality.
| hammock wrote:
| What is reader mode and how do I activate it? Is reader mode a
| low refresh rate?
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| I recently picked up a monitor light and the change is huge, I
| wish I did it sooner. My rule of thumb is that I obviously don't
| point lights in my eyes, only on camera. no overhead light, but
| lamps are great because they direct light away from you and
| bounce it around the surfaces of the room.
| wvenable wrote:
| I also found a monitor light to be a great addition.
| C-Loftus wrote:
| Are there any communities of others online dealing with general
| eye strain? Or other blogs / videos that have helped others? I
| have had chronic eye pain for a while now and could really
| benefit from hearing what has helped others. I have not found
| doctors to be helpful
|
| I have a pretty normal Dell office monitor but not sure if I
| would benefit from an upgrade. I have relatively normal overhead
| lighting and try to take breaks or use a screen reader as much as
| I can, but haven't had much luck reducing pain.
| kanbankaren wrote:
| The standard 60Hz refresh rate of monitors is unlikely to
| produce any eyestrain. The refresh rate of the backlight could
| produce eyestrain and headaches.
|
| Unfortunately, the exact frequency of the PWM used for
| backlight isn't often mentioned in the specs.
|
| In general, anything above 500 Hz is better as some people get
| headaches even for 250 Hz.
| kanbankaren wrote:
| P. S. The linked website is poor on details and not worth
| reading.
| camhart wrote:
| There's a good chance its due to dry eye. If so, you need to
| blink more. Get an eye compress (heat it up in microwave, toss
| on eyes for 10 minutes). That can help release oils from glands
| onto your eyes. Artificial tears can help with comfort but wont
| solve the underlying problem--we don't blink (enough) when we
| focus on screens that are close to our face.
| C-Loftus wrote:
| I don't think that is the case but I could be wrong. My eyes
| do not feel dry at all and drops or hot washclothes haven't
| made much difference. Maybe that compress you speak of is
| better though
| camhart wrote:
| Hot wash clothes don't maintain the heat long enough to
| release the oils. Decent eye compresses are $20. Here's a
| decent one. Certainly others work too.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Bruder-Activated-Recommended-
| Professi...
|
| I got a fancier one from Tear Restore that has little cut
| outs, so I can see while using it (instead of keeping eyes
| closed). It may not work quite as good as the bruder, but
| it lets me get things done while using it.
| lucg wrote:
| https://ledstrain.org/
| marcinreal wrote:
| I know of such a community: https://ledstrain.org/
|
| While it's informative, I would proceed with caution. Many
| users there indulge in a level of obsession that is not
| helpful. The basics of reducing eye strain are actually simple:
|
| 1. Don't use a display at unnecessarily high brightness. 2.
| Make sure there's plenty of natural light around you (avoid
| LEDs if possible). 3. Take frequent breaks and look off in the
| distance. (If you're in a social setting, assume an air of
| mystery with your ponderous gaze.) 4. Reduce your level of
| stress. Stress makes nothing better and everything worse. Enjoy
| life! Stretch regularly to reduce muscle tension in the body.
| 5. Probably diet helps, but that's a whole can of worms. Don't
| obsess over it, but try to reduce inflammatory foods.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| switching to light editor themes that more closely matches
| ambient lighting will reduce eye fatigue a ton too
| camhart wrote:
| A big thing not often spoken about with eye strain is dry eye
| caused by the lack of blinking due to focusing on screens too
| close to our face. This is an evolutionary phenomenon--close
| dangers cause extreme focus without blinking. Extreme focus on
| close items reduces our blinks.
|
| Our eye lids have glands in them that release oils on your eye
| with each blink. These oils help prevent the watery part of your
| tears from evaporating. When it evaporates your eyes dry out
| causing discomfort and potentially pain.
|
| If you don't blink enough, the oil doesnt get on your eyes and
| eventually, in extreme cases, the glands can even die. A lack of
| oil in tears can cause extreme eye fatigue and even pain.
|
| This is why dry eyes is on the rise. Remember to blink!
|
| I actually built a little web app to count my blinks. See
| https://dryeyestuff.com/. Not perfect, just a prototype. 100%
| free.
| amelius wrote:
| Interesting. Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious
| blink?
| camhart wrote:
| I'm not aware of any triggers to cause subconscious blinking.
| That'd be fantastic if there was an option though.
|
| The web app can trigger a notification if your blinks /
| minute drop too low. Only challenge is modern browsers
| throttle websites that aren't visible, so the blink counting
| gets messed up.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe you could set up the conditions for a Pavlovian
| response.
|
| E.g. let your app give a signal (e.g. beep or buzz) every
| 30 seconds if you don't blink. Then train yourself to blink
| if you hear the signal.
|
| Edit: Yes, it can be done:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeblink_conditioning
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious blink?
|
| you could set something up where a water gun squirts you on a
| random interval between 2-5 minutes. heh i think i would kill
| someone if they did that to me.
| freefaler wrote:
| btw, if you have 2 different monitors on different lengths from
| your eye you change focus more frequently and your eyes feel
| better.
|
| A laptop + big monitor is less irritating for the eyes as long
| as they aren't put exactly on the same line.
| binary_slinger wrote:
| Another tool, although I have only anecdotal evidence, is f.lux
| and similar software.
| dinkblam wrote:
| > An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes
|
| indeed. i am unsure where the love for those "spotlights"
| embedded into the ceiling comes from. every time i enter a room
| that has them i want to crouch like gollum. the only thing they
| seem to do is blind you.
|
| indirect lights can be expensive and hard to find though. i built
| 12 hanging lamps that illuminate the ceiling instead of the floor
| myself, which saves a few thousand bucks but was unfortunately
| more work than expected.
| amluto wrote:
| Ceiling downlights can me (for most people and most purposes)
| quite nice, but they need to actually be spotlights. If you
| have a light that is close to being a point source (very bright
| per unit solid angle), which includes most lights aimed at
| people, you want that light to avoid emitting light at an angle
| that you're likely to be able to see. So a downlight on a
| ceiling should emit very little light past an angle of, say, 45
| degrees or even less from vertical. After all, for _most_
| purposes (but not bedrooms when in bed!), you are not looking
| straight up, and a light that 's shining on the top of your
| head or even on the tops of your eyebrows is not irritating
| your eyes. But a bright light, shining at you, that's in your
| field of view when looking horizontally, can be extremely
| annoying.
|
| The office-style solution is big diffuse ceiling lights. The
| easy but rather inefficient solution is indirect lighting. The
| expensive solution is to use high-end architectural lights that
| have a trim or lens design that makes the light source almost
| invisible from shallow angles. An excellent and cheap solution
| is to use highly recessed lights with standard, inexpensive
| designs. A PAR30S lamp in an ordinary (not "shallow") 5" or 6"
| ceiling can, with a trim that allows it to be installed at a
| respectable recess, can work very nicely. (That "S" is
| important. The whole point is that it's a "short neck" light,
| so the bottom surface is farther above the ceiling. And the PAR
| part is important, too -- PARs are reflectors, not floods, and
| they emit over a narrower angle.)
|
| Here's a decent article about it:
|
| https://www.agcled.com/blog/glare-and-ugr.html
|
| As far as I can tell, this is almost completely ignored for
| residential and small business lighting, especially with LED
| lights from places like Costco and Home Depot. You do not want
| a bright light that emits over 180 degrees installed in plane
| with your ceiling.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| A lot of the guidelines that are used to light a scene for a
| camera are also quite useful for lighting a room for yourself,
| just with less light needed as the human eye has a much higher
| dynamic range than a camera sensor:
|
| * Use diffuse light. This usually means multiple light sources
| bouncing and diffusing light off surfaces (ceilings, walls, etc)
| or diffusers.
|
| * Minimize shadows. Shadows lead to contrast which can lead to
| eye strain. Use multiple, maybe directional, light sources to
| illuminate shadows.
|
| * Minimize highlights. Windows without blinds let in lots of
| light which leads to contrast and can lead to eye strain.
| Curtains and blinds are great ways to diffuse light.
|
| * Uniform color temperature. Try to make sure all your lights
| have the same color temperature. Small variations are okay but
| large color temperature variations lead to color contrast which
| also tends to be hard on eye strain.
|
| * Select your color temperature based on needs and feeling. A lot
| of people prefer warmer color temperature lights and cool
| temperature lights are known to be more stressful for folks with
| anxiety-related conditions, but if your work requires accurate
| color representation, or you find yourself mentally trying to
| compensate for color temperature, then change the temperature to
| what you find most productive yet relaxing.
|
| * Wall color. Remember that "white" light that reflects off
| colored surfaces will take on a hue similar to the reflected
| surfaces. Walls of different colors can cause challenges for
| uniform color temperature, and warm colored walls can take cold
| lights and turn them warm.
|
| A side effect, of course, is that your room will become a lot
| more photogenic. It's no coincidence since photogenic rooms are
| often just easiest on the eye to look at.
|
| "Golden Hour" is considered a great time for photogenic events,
| photographs, and videos. "Golden Hour" lighting tends to be
| diffuse, not too strong, and warm toned. Humans tend to really
| like this style of lighting and if you do too, you might want to
| recreate some of these properties in your office.
| toddmorey wrote:
| In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work
| (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm
| color temperatures. The exact color temp can be a personal
| preference, but I think a lot of people aren't privy to the
| difference the color temperature of "white" light can make!
|
| I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and
| replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| In general I think the population at large, and especially
| programmer types, know way too little about lighting given
| how ubiquitous both lighting and photography/videography is
| in our everyday life.
|
| Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper
| Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default
| instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue
| light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary
| way to use your device at night. None of that wussy
| shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't
| meaningfully reduce blue light hazard.
|
| I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have
| zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting
| my computer screen. No one supports this because we are
| stupid.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-
| ene...
|
| The laser pointer community of all groups understands this
| stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use
| the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue
| lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower
| powered green one, which usually will only temporarily
| blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser
| will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent
| blindness.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > The laser pointer community of all groups understands
| this stuff well
|
| This has been my major frustration also. Different
| enthusiast communities all discover these things
| independently and talk about them in their own domain
| language. Night photography and astral photography talks
| about red shifting as well.
| c0balt wrote:
| > They claim to know a lot but then none of them build
| proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy
| default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning
| ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as
| the primary way to use your device at night.
|
| Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this
| is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has
| built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For
| Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions
| that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-
| sunset for Wayland.
| wyager wrote:
| While the color temperature situation has improved, the
| actual spectral quality of most consumer LED lighting still
| leaves a lot to be desired. CRI makes an effort to measure
| this, although it's a low-granularity measurement.
|
| I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it
| to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs
| with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still
| can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite
| series)
|
| Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color
| temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue
| noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to
| start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.
| wonger_ wrote:
| Where do you buy the surplus cinema lighting equipment? And
| how do you mount it inside your house?
|
| I went down a high CRI office lighting rabbit hole last
| year and I could only find expensive, new photography
| lights.
| sumea wrote:
| I am quite sensitive to glare. I have tried many setups in my
| windowless office with low ceiling height and have found linear
| up-down pendant lights the best option. Up-light is more
| important as it bounces soft light from ceiling. When I want to
| work in dimmer environment in the evenings, I switch off the
| down-light.
|
| I also try to buy lightning fixtures that are designed anti-
| glare although they are more expensive. You can also make
| pendant lights yourself with led strips and aluminium profiles.
|
| Your eyesight and glasses also matter a lot. My glasses are
| quite worn with lots of scratches. They definitely make issues
| worse.
| nluken wrote:
| Many people overlook how spaces are lit from an aesthetic
| perspective as well as a from the functional perspective this
| article is written from. Lamps and other eye-level lighting
| sources do more than just help eye strain as the article
| suggests; they also work wonders from an interior design
| perspective, and make spaces feel way more livable. I always find
| homes overly reliant on overhead lighting struggle to shake the
| more sterile feel of offices, where overhead dominates.
| jen729w wrote:
| This is worth considering in the context of driving at night.
|
| I used to get terrible eye strain, causing fatigue and
| sleepiness. Obviously not good.
|
| Then I bought a Saab 900. It had a 'night mode' that disabled all
| dials except the speedo. The lights went off and the dial went
| down. (It came back on if it needed to alert you of something,
| say low fuel.) [0]
|
| This made a radical difference, and led me to the dash-brightness
| dial that nobody ever touches. Turns out if you turn that way
| down, reducing the contrast between you and the road, it's
| actually enough to get you 90% there. Because you probably don't
| drive a 1992 Saab (more's the pity).
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIfzUqYEkiw
| iforgot22 wrote:
| My Crown Vic can be pretty dark on the inside. The problem with
| this is the outside light sources like other headlights,
| especially with certain cars like Teslas that are super bright
| and aim high. If anything, I feel less eye strain with more
| lights inside. But either way, I get a headache any time I
| drive for >2hr at night, haven't found any solution.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Are there any cars that DON'T have a way to adjust the
| brightness of the dash lighting?
|
| Every car I've ever owned (86 Chrysler, 2000 Suzuki, 2016
| Subaru, 2019 Tesla) had a dial to adjust the brightness of the
| dashboard lighting, or in the case of the Tesla, adjust the
| brightness of the screen.
|
| Sure, I couldn't completely shut anything off like your Saab,
| but I could easily turn the brightness down pretty dim.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Related, the color of your dash matters, the modern backlit
| screens (both dash and entertainment) emit much white and blue
| light.
|
| Mazda and Bmw (traditionally, less the last 5 years) seem to
| consider human ux more than others - hence orange lighting.
| Modern ambient (orange or green) can be nice.
| aunagar wrote:
| Would love to know how did you generate those renderings? Is it
| blender or something else?
| rusty-ux wrote:
| It's adobe substance stager 3d
| bensandcastle wrote:
| The natural light and diffuse light are good tips.
|
| Next is to get a big screen eg. 85" 4K and put it 1.5m away. That
| should be your main display. I don't have that all the time, but
| then I get some variety, 85" @ 1.5m a lot of the time, laptop
| some of the time, driving/walking etc. for longer range.
|
| 1.5m is the midpoint of focus for the muscles in your eyes.
|
| I built augmented reality displays and this was the focal plane
| we selected for to minimize eye strain and the felt sense of
| vergence/accommodation conflict.
|
| We could then throw graphics as close as ~30cm, or at infinity
| using vergence adjustments, even though the accommodation was at
| a fixed 1.5m. Graphics felt best at that distance, but they also
| felt ok in the range 0.5-10m, which suited nearly all
| productivity scenarios.
| frabert wrote:
| 85" @ 1.5m is insanely big for me, do you not get sore having
| to dart your eyes about to read the corners?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _do you not get sore having to dart your eyes about to read
| the corners?_
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if this is what makes it healthier.
| Not only are you exercising your eyes, you're also giving
| them a chance to let you know when they need a break.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I do almost exactly this, but instead use a cheapish 65"
| 4k/60hz TV instead. I can see bits of my surroundings with my
| peripheral vision, but only with the parts of my vision that
| are already blurry.
|
| I suspect that 85" was chosen to maximize immersion for
| gamers (cover the entire field of view), rather than to
| minimize eyestrain. For me doing development work on a 65"
| from about 1.5m is close to ideal.
| neves wrote:
| I made a glasses with the focus optimized for 1.5m. A lot
| easier on my eyes for working than my progressive lenses.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| How did you go about that? Can you just take your
| prescription someplace and have them made?
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Not OP but look into "computer glasses". Usually they're
| optimized for distances a bit closer than 1.5 meters, but
| I'm sure that can be changed.
| layer8 wrote:
| The environment and the screen should have similar brightness. In
| the pictures in the article, the screen seems much too bright in
| comparison.
| rusty-ux wrote:
| You are spot on! - was a limitation of my 3d rendering
| abilities but great point.
| divan wrote:
| Having worked from home for many years, I was surprised that I
| had never come across the acronym "WFH" before. It took me a
| moment to decipher its meaning, especially since the article
| introduced another acronym, "PWM" (pulse-width modulation), right
| at the start.
| hammock wrote:
| Have you heard of COVID? Is your home the ISS or something?
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Is no lighting considered too little? I like to sit in the dark
| with nothing but a computer monitor for light. I have noticed
| this greatly reduces eye-strain and distractions, but perhaps
| that is just me.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| This used to work for me as well, but one day my eyes just gave
| out. I now need a setup similar to the article. I use two
| diffuse light sources at corners in the room, with BenQ light
| bar in front, and (almost most importantly) a warm lamp
| backlighting the monitor. I might replace the backlight with an
| RGB bias light of some sort, but it has to be there or
| everything gets painful fast.
| freefaler wrote:
| Yeah, light behind the monitor is a great idea. Reduces
| contrast between the bright monitor and dark background.
|
| I've used this for years and it makes working during the
| evening so much better.
| Kiro wrote:
| Same here. Sounds like people are describing their yoga studios
| in this thread. Not for me.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| You're an exception.
|
| For most people, sitting in the dark with only their monitor
| giving off light _massively_ increases eye-strain.
| jjcm wrote:
| One slightly different approach I haven't seen mentioned here - I
| use grow lights in my office.
|
| They're way brighter, so simulate sunlight better, are full
| spectrum, and as a bonus my plants are super happy. I use 5 of
| these with a diffuser: https://www.amazon.com/SANSI-Daylight-
| Spectrum-Sunlight-Gree...
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| What do you use as the diffuser? I also use these, but they're
| a bit too bright and I find myself shutting them off because
| the light isn't diffuse enough.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| From my experience, if you're going to do just one thing in this
| list, it should be taking breaks. It's also the only thing you
| can reliably control even in the office.
| irunmyownemail wrote:
| Light on my desk for light under the monitor, light from behind
| me which bounces off the angled ceiling and only light themes no
| dark themes.
| taylorbuley wrote:
| Environmental modification is one of my favorite emotional coping
| strategies. It.. feels like you're actually doing something!
| Cleaning up/tidying, "sacred space creation," light and color
| therapy all work way more effectively than you can believe.
| hammock wrote:
| Talk to me about color therapy
| tonymet wrote:
| does anyone know if there is a phase-shifter for led lights? a
| way to shift each led 60hz cycle to create more-uniform light?
| vault wrote:
| @jahfer what about dark mode/night mode? are you using it?
| darkwater wrote:
| Sooooo, I always saw offices with neon bulbs, so, very very cold
| light (well, actually "hotter" in Kelvin degrees...) and very
| bright. So I copied this in my home office, which is a 12 square
| meter (130 square foot) room with 6x 7000K bulbs, each emitting
| about 800 lumen. Am I doing totally wrong, according to TFA?
| Should I replace them with warm bulbs? I'usong GU10 bulbs.
| andrewfromx wrote:
| I started leaving most warm nightshift on MacOS and iOS on 24/7.
| Made a huge difference. Now when I see a normal not warm screen
| it hurts.
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