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Comment by pedro_caetano | Hacker News Reader

Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding retinal damage?

I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.

More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.

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Some lidar units simply use the wavelength that the human eye is opaque to.

The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.

> human eye is opaque to

Absorbing the laser isn't necessarily any good. Very hypothetically it could lead to cataracts.

Sun emits much stronger IR, near-IR, UV

And staring directly at the sun is not recommended.

Absolutely, and is a major cause of cataracts. Somewhat near 100% of people with lenses in their eyes will get cataracts eventually if they are ever exposed to unfiltered sunlight.

That's why we don't look at it.

I remember those old cellphones with weak IR filters. It was a scandal because light clothing turns out to be more transparent to IR than to visible light so they were acting as a sort of clothing "X-Ray" in bright light. Creepers on the Internet tried to start a whole new genre of porn but were shut down in a hurry by cellphone manufacturers adding robust IR filters on the next generation of smartphones.

Shame that perverts had to ruin that for us, it was kinda neat to point a TV remote as the camera and see the bulb light up.

I suspect we can't quantify human eye-damage enough to easily rule-out chronic effects... until it's too late for the patient.

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