Viewing Angle and Distance in Computer Workstations (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Viewing Angle and Distance in Computer Workstations (1994)

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29 pointswalterbell7 comments

Those preferred viewing angles from Hill and Kroemer ( http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140138608967228 ?) seem distinctly low. My uneducated guess is that those results, from people asked to use computer workstations in 1986, probably reflect hunt-and-peck typists' need to move their eyes frequently between keyboard and screen. That leaves you in basically the same situation as a seated touchscreen user or seated pen-and-paper draughtsman, for whom a diagonally sloped work surface is the best compromise between the near-vertical viewing angle of a cinema screen and the need to see your hands while avoiding gorilla arm. (While the dead-level surface of most modern desks is mostly optimised for piling crap on.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444990 For touch typing I assume that a more cinema-like viewing angle is better.

These days, though, there's an odd mix of typists, because everyone is self taught, and most people have begun typing as soon as they learn how to read and write.

Both touch typing and hunt and peck typing are in severe decline. Mobile devices have created all kinds of mutants, and no one gives a shit about "the home row" anymore. I watch those old videos about posture and training oneself to type without looking at the keyboard by typing endless garbage over and over, and I have to laugh, because I've never seen anything less important seem like such obvious brainwashing.

>because I've never seen anything less important seem like such obvious brainwashing.

I take it you're not a touch typist? What kind of wpm do you get?

WPM is an archaic metric, and as my top speed I target only a reasonable conversational pace in chat windows, comparable to verbal conversation. Anything more is kind of a waste. As long as people don't feel like my pace of typing is lagging during a chat, I don't really need to be much faster than that.

I don't have a problem meeting those demands, and composing my thoughts, and contemplating what I wish to type usually consumes more time than the act of typing itself.

Bandwidth measured in bytes probably makes more sense these days. But again, I haven't bothered to measure how fast I type, other than a gut intuition for how often I get sniped in chat rooms, when people beat me and say something before I can, alongside how impatient people seem to get with me.

Key findings:

"Every one of the subjects ... judged the eye to screen distance of 20 inches to be too close. All accepted a 40 inch distance. Grandjean reported an average preferred viewing distance of 30 inches ... the closer the object, the more downward people wanted to look. When the target was 40 inches away, the preferred viewing angle was -30 degrees. When the target was moved in to 20 inches, the downward preference increased to -38 degrees. The head was not permitted to move during these tests, so the downward gaze angle was caused solely by movement of the eyes."

In a multi-monitor system, each monitor can have a different distance and font size, to avoid the eye being locked into a single focal distance for many hours. In a single-monitor system, vary the distance between user/keyboard and monitor.

That's fine for young people. But at age 65, my eyes do not have the ability yours may to focus at a variety of different distances.

I use and recommend a pair of single vision computer glasses. These are adjusted to let my eyes focus on a screen 20" away, which happens to be my viewing distance for a laptop in normal use. My eyes are completely relaxed when viewing a screen at that distance.

I could have picked any other distance, like the farther distances discussed in the article, but then I would be stuck at that viewing distance. I wouldn't be able to use a laptop display at all but would have to always use an external display placed farther away.

Since I do want to be able to use the laptop all by itself, e.g. when traveling, I had my glasses made for that 20" laptop viewing distance.

So when I use a second monitor alongside my main laptop display (like the portrait mode 24" 4K monitor I use next to my high-DPI ThinkPad or MacBook at my home office), that monitor must be close to the same 20" distance, or it will be out of focus and I won't be able to use it comfortably.

Have you seen magnetic reader clip-ons where the additional lens is custom made and positioned to match the curve of your distance lens?

https://buychemistrie.com

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