Getting up to a modern DPI is a game changer right?
I have been messing with VR lately and that is a new dimension as well, similar in change to the jump to high DPI. Ignoring the stereoscopic part, you also don't realise the scale of things until they are in the correct FOV in front of you. I see now why simracing boffins faff about with FOV so much on their screens! I took the effort to calculate FOV for my desktop monitor and where I sit, and in FPS games and it made a huge difference to immersion.
When I was like maybe 19 there was this Quake3 player who went by Zero4 who was in the top few on Earth at that time, and my 16 year old brother slapped him around so effortlessly during their biweekly workouts I knew that it was going to be more fun to watch than to be 1-px railed before I figured out which gun I was holding :)
Even if I'm off by a factor of two he was faster than an F22 pilot, by a lot.
I’m currently using WezTerm on Mac OS because it renders very crisp fonts and has GPU-accelerated ligatures, it’s pretty slick and I’d recommend trying it out.
I’ve messed around a bunch with my Ubuntu machine with the same terminal/font/etc. and never got a result I liked.
If you have a really good config that you like I bet I wouldn’t be the only one who gave it a spin!
I assume other desktop environments support something similar.
However, they also claim there is a natural relaxing of the eyes, which adds to the immersion.
I wonder if such a display would work in an office environement. A quick look for any literature came up blank.
It's known that having less light exposure (e.g. going outside) correlates heavily with decreased eyesight.
What follows is my best synopsis on what is wrong with the industry, what causes worsening vision, and what you can do to resolve your vision issues in a matter of months and never have to worry about it again. You'll still need some form of corrective lenses though - I'm not selling bullshit.
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Most cases of myopia (nearsightness), involving progressively worsening vision, are largely due to inaccurate lens prescriptions.
An optometrist or optician will have you sit with your head in the phoropter asking "better/worse" while flipping lenses - pretty much a binary search type of approach. But this is often done hastily and results in inaccurate prescriptions.
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Unfortunately, inaccurate scripts are often inflicted upon children which as I will describe later, compounds into worsening vision over time, with the opticians/optometrists prescribing higher and higher power lenses that are only solving an issue that is created by the previous history of inaccuracy! Telltale signs of inaccurate scripts include:
- minor corrections
Eyes are not static objects and vision actually does vary from month to month, day to day, lighting conditions, blood pressure, etc. If a correction is minor, it's almost always unecessary and harmful.
- slightly different prescriptions for left (OS) and right (OR) eyes.
99.9% of folks have equivalent vision in both eyes. Like I said above, if a difference is minor, a correction would almost always be harmful.
- minor cylinder corrections (astigmatism.)
Astigmatism is extremely rare and when it does occur it's almost never minor. These corrections are especially egregious as they cause distortion compensation.
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So why do eye professionals commit these cardinal acts of eye destruction upon their patients? Well we already discussed hastyness but that is clearly a vice that is going to result in bad outcomes in any profession.
What else? Well, eye professionals are taught to seek out as perfectly sharp an image as possible, and then back off the power a bit to reduce the possibility of eyestrain, headache, and dizziness. Some professionals don't even back off the power though..
In order to accomplish this task of perfect sharp vision, they add all of these minor corrections. When these ill-fitting lenses are worn for months on end, the body has a somatic response. The eyeballs elongate, which pushes the focal plane back, causing further myopia. [1]
The patient goes back to the eye doctor and now receives an even more incorrect script based on the transient state their eyes are in, induced by a cascading patterned history of harmful scripts.
In the worst case, the eye doctor recommends laser eye surgery which shaves the corneal lens of your eye into an artificial lens. Essentially, they carve your current harmful prescription straight into your eyeball. And then guess what happens? The eyeball shortens and often, the patients vision becomes progressively worse again. It can take months, but it does happen. [2] And now the fix that they recommend? More laser eye surgery. It's barbaric.
So please, do not get eye surgery before trying what I recommend below. Surgery on the cornea is advertised as non invasive but it can cause life long issues such as chronic dry eye. Please try to assess whether your vision is actually bad, or just a transient state due to a long history of bad prescriptions and poor habits.
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How do you break the cycle and restore your vision?
1) First, look at your current script. How asymmetric is it? How small are the cylinder values, if any?
Lower the scripts power and make the prescription symmetric. Remove the minor cylinder values. So for example, if you had -3.6 and -3.4 with some small astigmatism corrections, just ask for a script for -3.4 SPH in both eyes.
2) Make sure the pupillary distance is correct - eye professionals are notorious for fucking this up because the PD needs be to custom set for the frame the lenses will be going in, otherwise you'll have lenses with a focal center that is not aligned with the center of your eyeball. This causes distortion and uneven focus, causing eye strain and worsening vision.
3) Aspheric lenses - buy good lenses like Seiko double aspherics - just like cinema or photo lenses cost a lot of money because they reduce abberation and edge distortion, your eyes benefit from the same technology. Bottom dollar spherical lenses are okay, but strain is not healthy for eyes, and a good $300 set of Seiko transition lenses with coatings can last 10+ years. It's worth your eye health.
4) Have multiple pairs of spectacles. Use the weakest usable one (or no specs) depending on the task you are doing. For instance, I'm on my phone in bed, so I am not using any glasses. This will improve your vision over time. You can slowly reduce the power of your scripts if you care about it. I went from -4.75 to -3.5 and I'm happy with what I'm at, so I don't spend any effort trying to lower any further. But if you have the money, the time, and the will, you can get to -1.X territory through judicious use of a set of activity appropriate lenses.
Lastly, buy your own frame, buy your own pupilary distance tools, buy your own trial lens kit and trial frame like the Oculus UB6. Take time and figure out the right prescription for yourself without it being rushed. Test it and have it remade if the center of focus of the lenses is not at the center of your eyes. PD is integral!
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An eye professional who cares and understands these things CAN help and even properly measure these values but they are rare. Sometimes if you want something done right, you kind of have to do it yourself. Or at the very least, guide or give your demands. After all, you are the paying customer.
Hope this helps others break the cycle of worsening vision. If anyone has any question, feel free to reach out.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/
[2] https://www.webmd.com/eye-health/news/20030410/some-patients...
My optometrist did in fact put having a current prescription as the #1 thing. I’m a lazy guy in some ways but I value what eyesight I’ve got so I go every year on the dot to get my prescription measured by competent professionals.
I asked: “(Given that we have the correct prescription and that my screen usage is unfortunately not likely to go down) what can I do now?”
Cranking up the font size and paying for a solid monitor is obviously mitigation at best: the healthy thing for a guy like me would be to run around and throw spears at moving animals, not live in a glass box staring at a glass panel.
But circumstances being what they are? I can pull a longer stretch more often on the better display without getting a headache than I could before. It’s anecdotal, N=1, but the only subject is me and I’m not selling anything.
Resolution really doesn't matter much when it comes to strain. I have a 2011 2560x1440 27" monitor that I've always used large font on. What's important is being able to see without straining and a larger UI helps. Having higher resolutions is nice but largely unecessary. Blur is not going to happen from making things larger if you do it right. Doing it right means that you shouldn't be changing the actual output resolution of your OS, but rather the interface size itself. On OSX you'll want to use the HiDPI (Retina) resolution options. Enabled through this script: https://github.com/xzhih/one-key-hidpi On Windows you can just set the magnification/font size through the settings panel. This applies to any resolution display -- use the full physical resolution!!
Frame rates are actually more of a factor. 120hz+ is going to cut down on strain. Avoiding PWM [1] on phones, tablets, laptops, and monitors will also help.
But really, the gold standard is for you to wear a different set of spectacles when you do your computer work. You shouldn't need the power of your full prescription to do close up work. It's destroying your eyes.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Why-Pulse-Width-Modulation-PWM...
TYSM for speaking out!!!
You can read about the double aspherics here:
https://www.2020mag.com/article/double-asphericity-a-freefor...
[1] https://www.seiko-optical.com/fileadmin/media/marketing_shop...
You're making a lot of strong claims that are unsupported or even counterfactual.
E.g.:
> Most cases of myopia (nearsightness), involving progressively worsening vision, are largely due to inaccurate lens prescriptions.
Interesting idea, but what do you have to support this provocative claim?
You argument about minor corrections isn't even logical, which makes me doubt your judgement in any of this.
And it's never a good sign when the citations provided contradict the claims. [1] doesn't support the claims it's attached to. In fact, it says:
"The underlying biological cause of myopia is unknown, and there is no widely accepted means of prevention or cure."
I hope you're not really a practicing optometrist.
For myopia, there's really not much you can do other than ask them their approach to vision correction. For example, do they recommend multiple pairs of glasses for different activities? If they don't, you can immediately cull them or you can use them as a service and give them instructions. Doctors ultimately serve you, and if you want a couple scripts, minor corrections removed, etc. these aren't groundbreaking demands they'll reject.
My workflow is especially dangerous in this regard because I do almost everything in the terminal so it’s especially easy to get sucked in.
I’ve known sightless hackers who were awesome, it’s definitely not game over, but it also definitely slows you down.
For most hackers our eyes and the musculature starting all the way back in your lower spine through to your fingertips is such a huge part of our livelihood. I’ve been trying to treat all of it with more care.
As someone who also mostly works in the terminal and who has stopped wearing glasses thanks to a weird approach, try a pure white or slightly yellowish background with a black font in the daytime.
Most terminal users will find that weird, but among other weird things I tried it worked wonders for me!
Apologies for the anecdote. I know for myself, I sometimes felt a stigma to investing in "nerdy" equipment designed to make computing more sustainable. Almost like if I don't commit to the furniture maybe I will become that out and about person I think I should be. Funnily enough, it was only after I had gotten into a bunch of outdoor hobbies that I decided to really splurge on quality of life equipment at the computer.
I don’t want to speak for you but you said one or two things that echo with me: by hyper-optimizing my workstation to be the most comfortable place in my house I think I sort of feed a tendency to hide from difficult parts of life by just working too much.
I also think you’re onto something about activity, particularly outdoor activity being the best counterweight to that tendency, I just struggle to get an active routine going from a cold start.
Usually if I’m active I can keep it that way, but whether it’s C19 lockdown or a death in the family, it’s very easy to get knocked back into that sedentary state.
Any of that resonate?
But while there are no guarantees it sounded plausible and a few Google searches found other people saying it had helped, the downside is a quite high but not utterly ruinous expense on the thing I look at more than anything else, and even a pretty expensive retail computer monitor would only have to extend my useful eyesight by a comparatively modest period of time to pay for itself.
And while it very well may be placebo, it certainly feels less physically stressful on my eyes and facial muscles, so I don’t regret it even though I’ll have to cut the budget somewhere else.
I went to the optometrist recently and my vision had abruptly tanked, I have a much stronger prescription than a year ago.
“Have you been pulling long screen hours?”
“Yeah. Very long.”
“Well that’s why.”
“Outside of cutting screen hours, is there anything else I can do?”
“Get the highest DPI display you can afford and crank up the font size. Won’t help much, but it’ll help a little.”
So I splurged on the 6k display. I can literally feel it in my temples after a long session.