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How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

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Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#271

Post by Izkata »

qweiopqweiop123 wrote: post #195
jwr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree with 1.5m, but I do recommend checking how close you are to your monitor. Let's assume you have a reasonably sized office monitor (27" or so). Extend your arm with your hand as a fist, forward. If your screen is closer to you than your knuckles, it's too close. Now, for the height: all monitor stands are too low. If you keep your head straight and look at the monitor, you should be looking at the upp…

I've always heard you should be in line with the top of your monitor when looking straight ahead. A quick google has says the said. Either way we're on the same lines - too many people are looking up too much when looking at the monitor. It takes more effort than looking down.

GP said too low, not too high. I'm thinking a typo though because that doesn't make much sense to me and I agree with you - I always have to adjust monitors as low as they can go in the office.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#272

Post by Der_Einzige »

onli wrote: post #120
Der_Einzige wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to? But note that the wikipedia article you li…

It's insanity to be told that your claim is basically psudoscience or fake when night vision preservation, the mechanism of prevented eye-strain, is a well confirmed and relied upon part of our biology. Go talk to astronomers. I'm aware of Wikipedia claiming what you say it does. That's an incitement of Wikipedia and the big blue light crowd.

Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display tech. Before OLED, I couldn't actually "turn off the non red pixels", and thus never fully eliminated blue light from my display. Most of the "science" around blue light is trash. Yes, I say this as someone who actively published at top AI conferences and is intimately familiar with peer review.

I'm going to keep on preserving my night vision and browsing the internet for hours with zero issues at night while being told that my red shifted phone is placebo. You try turning your OLED phone on at full brightness in the middle of the night with and without the red-shift and tell me which hurts your eyes more...

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#273

Post by smileysteve »

imp0cat wrote: post #180
smileysteve wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can usually turn the infotainment screen off completely at night. However, for some manufacturers, this means the screen displays black, but is still powered, ie. the backlight is on, which can be annoing.

There is a big difference between "can turn off" and "doesn't emit white or blue light in the cabin at night by default" when it comes to infotainment.

Maybe the oleds will allow manufacturers become more conscious of this in the future, but as far as I can see, BMW, Ford (Cadillac), Mb group, and Kia Hyundai, Honda are not consciously limiting their lighting colors.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#274

Post by lo_zamoyski »

I find that having a desk up against the wall (as in the diagram) makes lighting odd, and creates a claustrophobic feeling (like you're being punished by being made to face the wall or a corner).

Facing away from doors is also psychologically unsettling, because people can sneak up on you without warning. This can cause distraction, as part of your attention to be pulled away from the task at hand by the vigilance of your subconscious.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#275

Post by evanjrowley »

neilv wrote: post #166

If the room in the illustrations is what you have to work with, consider sometimes putting the desk in front of the window, facing out. When the sun is not line-of-sight, and you don't have any bright flares off other objects (like car windows or chrome). That gives you natural light, it should be even left/right, and it happens to be awesome fill light for looking good on videoconf. You can also glance around your m…

This is an underrated comment.

A desk positioned so that you can view things beyond it at a distance has been the best remedy for my eyestrain, and I say that as someone using cheap oversized 1080p screens. An expensive high DPI monitor might be more convenient than rearranging a whole room to reorient an office desk, but in my experience, the value it provides is fantastic. No matter the quality of the monitor, if my ability to adjust my focus is impeded by a room's layout, then my eyes will feel the same strain they'd have if I'd been staring at a wall all day at an arm's length distance.

Interestingly, the photo search results I get for "desk ceo" all show the desk oriented in the ideal way (i.e., not facing a wall): https://kagi.com/images?q=desk+ceo

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#276

Post by rusty-ux »

thepratt wrote: post #235

Great set of suggestions. I experience a fair amount of over lighting on some calls due to my monitor (a 42" Dell thing, maybe sitting 50-60cm away). Most things I use have dark mode, but when someone shares their screen and it's pure white I end up looking like an apparition. Does anyone have any additional suggestions where the monitor itself is the cause of the excess light? Is distance a helping factor (someone e…

That’s really tough. For me I use a display that has an ambient light sensor so it matches my surroundings, that might help a bit.

Ideally your environment is balancing the light level of your monitor (maybe 50% black level) so you can have something that works if it’s a white display window or dark.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#277

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

Aerroon wrote: post #228
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a basement and had fairly good success with certain "led shop lights" to make the space feel more like it has natural light (though I could improve things further). I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial. Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has ra…

I've been wondering for a while now if our indoor lighting is too dim. Even in the shade during midday you're looking at 20,000 lux. Overcast days look dark and dreary and they're on the 1000-2000 lux range. Meanwhile home lighting is well below the 500 lux range, if not even in the 100-200. I even suspect that the current near-sightedness epidemic is caused by people spending too much time in dim lighting. Maybe if…

Yeah there's definitely that aspect too. Though nowadays, led lighting is so efficient that you can get a lot of brightness on reasonable wattage.

That's not enough for the light to feel natural though, you also have to have the parallel rays. And then there's also challenges with brighter lighting to set it up so it's not uncomfortably bright in your field of view or blinding you :-)

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#278

Post by Izkata »

qwery wrote: post #216

0) Yes, an evenly lit workspace is essential for any work. 0.1) Buy more lamps -- nothing fancy, ideally second hand, always with the common affordable household light socket. By the time you have the lighting arranged how you want, you may have too many lamps. At that point you can use your army of lamps to inform bigger (& more permanent) spending decisions. 1) If you have a regular occurrence of eyestrain or itchy…

> 2) If your monitor's backlight flickers at a low enough frequency[0] that it's a problem -- get a new monitor[1]. If you spend enough time using your monitor that the eyestrain is real, upgrading your monitor is a no-brainer.

My work laptop flickers and the only solution was to throttle the CPU. Seems like it draws too much power and the AC cable that came with it can't handle it at medium loads.

Re: How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

#279

Post by onli »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #272
onli wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to? But note that the wikipedia article you li…

It's insanity to be told that your claim is basically psudoscience or fake when night vision preservation, the mechanism of prevented eye-strain, is a well confirmed and relied upon part of our biology. Go talk to astronomers. I'm aware of Wikipedia claiming what you say it does. That's an incitement of Wikipedia and the big blue light crowd. Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display te…

There is no big blue light crowd. There has always only been the "blue light is bad" position, which was completely ignored by the industry (with display colour defaults especially) until that turned around completely, after the success of f.lux broke a barrier I think.

Please notice two things: 1. It's not even about whether blue light might be harder on the eyes in general, but whether it matters on the brightness levels consumer devices are usually used (so astronomers are completely irrelevant to that discussion, and so is a modern phone at night at full brightness) and what the actual effects are in practice 2. It's an astonishing position to take, to at the one hand realize there is no scientific basis for the claim, but still act 100% convinced. Especially for an academic.

It's also not obvious why "night vision preservation" might be relevant. We are not talking about looking at things during the dark, but at (more or less brighly) illuminated objects.

I don't have skin in this game and likely won't respond further. I even have a weak red light shift active while writing this (I feel like it might help with the sleep rhythm a bit). But I am absolutely saying that claims like this need scientific evidence and that it is foolish to believe in such things only because it's currently a popular claim, to take that position that absolutely. This is not the correct way of thinking, and there is no need to not leave space for doubt.

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