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How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain

rustle.ca

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

#41

Post by bensandcastle »

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.

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

#42

Post by bunderbunder »

michaelteter wrote: post #2

This is another +1 for WFH. Many office environments have terrible lighting, and there's very little you can do about it.

The over-bright lighting, monitor glare, and eye strain are a favorite conversation topic at my workplace since RTO.

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

jen729w wrote: post #27

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-brigh…

[deleted]

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

#44

Post by toddmorey »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #23

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…

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.

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

#45

Post by amelius »

camhart wrote: post #39
amelius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious blink?

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.

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

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

#46

Post by toddmorey »

michaelteter wrote: post #2

This is another +1 for WFH. Many office environments have terrible lighting, and there's very little you can do about it.

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.

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

#47

Post by homebrewer »

marcyb5st wrote: post #5

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by Karrot_Kream »

toddmorey wrote: post #44
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #23

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…

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.

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!

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

#50

Post by frabert »

bensandcastle wrote: post #41

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 p…

85" @ 1.5m is insanely big for me, do you not get sore having to dart your eyes about to read the corners?
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