[Meta: I posted this to Facebook and it occurred to me it could be a good thing to xpost here. I might have posted it top-level to the old LW Discussion, but somehow “Submit To Front Page” felt too big for it.]
Lighting, melatonin, etc
In addition to using f.lux (google it if you don’t have it) I wear orange glasses in the evenings, to improve my sleep (and also the experience of looking at a screen at night).
This site makes glasses that are much more subtle and designed to be worn all the time. They seem to be implicitly claiming that
(A) looking at a blue screen is bad even midday,
(B) they have some way to block the blue light in a way that isn’t annoying.
Re: claim B… hm. It seems their glasses are pretty clear. The way that LCD screens work, virtually all of the blue light coming out of your screen is exactly one wavelength (about 440nm, if you’re curious). So maybe they’ve manufactured a material that absorbs say 50% of that wavelength but almost nothing of wavelengths more than 5nm away. That would be interesting—it would make computer screens have a distinct orangeness to them, while the rest of the world would look mostly normal. I think their tech is patented, so it might be something one could look up.
I am interested to hear what people think about claim A.
Oh, and there’s another claim:
(C) that “digital eye strain” has something to do with color as opposed to just looking at something <2 feet away for hours on end.
I think if you wanted to help your eyes strainwise, you might be better off with a program that makes your screen go black for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, and to have a habit of looking at something 20 feet away every time (this is based on some heuristic I read about).
[Meta: I posted this to Facebook and it occurred to me it could be a good thing to xpost here. I might have posted it top-level to the old LW Discussion, but somehow “Submit To Front Page” felt too big for it.]
Lighting, melatonin, etc
In addition to using f.lux (google it if you don’t have it) I wear orange glasses in the evenings, to improve my sleep (and also the experience of looking at a screen at night).
This site makes glasses that are much more subtle and designed to be worn all the time. They seem to be implicitly claiming that
(A) looking at a blue screen is bad even midday,
(B) they have some way to block the blue light in a way that isn’t annoying.
Re: claim B… hm. It seems their glasses are pretty clear. The way that LCD screens work, virtually all of the blue light coming out of your screen is exactly one wavelength (about 440nm, if you’re curious). So maybe they’ve manufactured a material that absorbs say 50% of that wavelength but almost nothing of wavelengths more than 5nm away. That would be interesting—it would make computer screens have a distinct orangeness to them, while the rest of the world would look mostly normal. I think their tech is patented, so it might be something one could look up.
I am interested to hear what people think about claim A.
Oh, and there’s another claim:
(C) that “digital eye strain” has something to do with color as opposed to just looking at something <2 feet away for hours on end.
I think if you wanted to help your eyes strainwise, you might be better off with a program that makes your screen go black for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, and to have a habit of looking at something 20 feet away every time (this is based on some heuristic I read about).