AR Computers to Terminate Eyestrain and Myopia | Hacker News Reader

AR Computers to Terminate Eyestrain and Myopia

eyewiki.org

48 pointsplun926 comments

One aspect of computer screen eye strain is the extra-ocular muscles not exploring using their full range on motion and instead being focused on the center of their field of vision non-stop. I went for a demo of the Apple Vision Pro hoping to have my whole field of view be one giant screen. Instead, the center is sharp and the periphery is extremely blurry. I was told this is to save on video processing resources. To make something sharp you have to move my whole head to look face it directly. It didn't even come close to having as much useful field of view as a nice setup with a couple of monitors. It was really not what I was hoping for.

The article promises that AR glasses will "keep the visual field broad and wide." Maybe products will fix this in future iterations, but I'm not too hopeful for the near future.

Seems possibly similar to the anti-myopia glasses for children that cause blur around the periphery, which is expected when not staring at a screen. So maybe that could be good?

I always thought those are anti-strabism, not anti-myopia. Maybe I was poorly informed. Couldn't really get used to them. Horrible, horrible feeling.

Seems strange considering their heavy usage of eye-tracking and the well known mediocre reception of fixed-foveation on other headsets. This was on a retail kit? I didn't notice this myself but I can't say I remember looking out for it.

The Apple Vision Pro definitely uses dynamic foveated rendering. It only fully renders what’s at the center of your vision, but it should be adjusting where this is in real-time based on the gaze tracking data. (It’s easy to observe this if you’re giving a demo and watching an external display.)

Especially given that gaze tracking is the primary input method in their UI - they spent a lot of time to get this right.

I feel like something might have been wrong with op’s demo unit?

> center is sharp and the periphery is extremely blurry. I was told this is to save on video processing resources.

It's caused by the panel/lens hardware. Center resolution is laptop-like, but by 35ish degrees off center that's down by ~half.[1]

[1] line graph in https://kguttag.com/2023/08/09/apple-vision-pro-part-5b-more... . General caveat that Guttag's "not possible"s sometimes have an implicit "if you're not doing anything weirdly off-VR-mainstream". Monitor replacement has very different constraints than mainstream gaming - like, refresh rates (and thus bandwidths) of 60 Hz and lower (even 20 Hz) can be fine, while for VR games that'd be absurd.

Thank you! The link is amazing.

I figured it was something like this. I went to go demo it specifically because I had a fantasy of using Apple Vision Pro as a monitor replacement. The demo quickly changed my mind and got me to consider all of the crazy home/office/mobile workspace upgrades I could do with a $3500 budget.

The "peripheral area of the retina continuously contacts sunlight" part is just wishful thinking at this point. Every company in this space except Xreal has abandoned the idea of a see-through display, and Xreal has only kept it because their focus is on weight and comfort over features and it lets them avoid needing passthrough cameras and everything that goes with them.

Oh, okay. But you can still use AR glasses/VR headsets/projectors, with distant (1-3 m) images to prevent myopia induced by extended periods of focusing on close objects when used in place of computer monitors or physical books, magazines, etc.

Then you're probably gonna be causing VAC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_confl...

VAC is minor if the 3D used is shallow around those focus distances. This requires manipulation by hand to be somehow abstracted, but for long-term use, you likely want that anyway for limb ergonomics.

Snap is another competitor in this space that has see-through displays via waveguides.

Also Viture, many people feel theirs are the best product, myself included.

I have Lenovo Legion Glasses 2 (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/vr-h...). They look like regular aviator sunglasses.

Anyone else reading this comparing it with their personal experience using AR devices and thinking that the current devices Oculus/Apple Vision Pro devices feel like they are increasing eyestrain?

I get no eyestrain, personally, when using my Quest 3. The focus distance of the virtual image is between 1-2 meters, which is pretty good. However, the device gets uncomfortable to use over long periods of time in other areas like the forehead, etc.

I now used both the oculus/quest and xreal for years now for many hours per day and never noticed. I get tested once a year and my eyesight remains the same (I am 50+ and don't need reading glasses still which apparently is not very normal here).

Has anyone every built a colimated monitor display? I have been thinking about building a collimated display system using 3 monitors or projectors and A mylar sheet to make display system near optical infinity. Like some old flight simulator systems. It will take up alot of space but should help eye strain I think.

I do wish there was something that simply provides an AR 3D display situated in a simple "room". I should be able to connect it to a computer with a Thunderbolt cable, much like I can connect a display today. No need for "apps" or log-in, or anything. Just a large display, some distance away (to reduce eye strain), but crucially also retina-quality text on that display. Additionally, such a device must not impose much in the way of hardware requirements on the computer it's connected to. Even if the required resolution is 8K per eye, to make the text crisp, all scaling and transforms should occur on the device itself.

We're not there yet, but the latest AR glasses like the XREAL One and Lenovo Legion Glasses offer 1080p resolution. It's not retina-quality text, but it's like the workspace of a standard computer monitor, at a large size and at a considerable distance away.

1080p is not nearly enough. You basically have to create sufficiently high resolution on a relatively small fraction of the image sensor. Even 4K is not enough for that (see e.g. Apple Vision Pro).

Yeah, it’s not a large workspace by any means. But it is still usable. And, it’s larger than what we had with monitors in the 90s and early 2000s.

This is a poorly contrived article which basically has no academic rigour at all, makes completely uncited statements and finishes in "clinical trails needed". Urgh. At best it's a hypothesis and that's pushing it.

Perhaps. Consider that billions of people around the world have myopia. We need more solutions.

But what if a person already had myopia?

Solutions like this can prevent further progression of myopia.

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