I mean yeah it’s obvious that it’s an oportunity for making money on a new marked and so on, but, even if it’s a bit silly, dreaming of VR technology like in Ready Player One(minus the distopian world) for real life it feels like the bad guys already won, when we will have the technology. Like the omni One is just about to be launched for the market and it’s sold in a bundle with the pico 4, which is owned by Tik Tok. Do you get what is grinding my gears about that?
The brightness of the sky outside dwarfs that of any display we can make, much less a tiny VR display. If they could squeeze the nits needed to make a VR screen look like real life into a display that small while retaining the quality, they would.
It might actually hurt your vision because it’s not bright enough, much like trying to read under a dim light starts to cause eye strain.
The human body is complex and we don’t understand everything that’s going in but heavy phone usage is strongly correlated with myopia - maybe that’s because people suffering from near sightedness really love their phones… but I think I’m going to need strong evidence that it’s not the more obvious reason before accepting that explanation.
VR might actually improve vision because the light level is extremely consistent but early studies don’t support that conclusion. I think long term VR usage is DOA, it’s fun as hell to beat some sabers or spin up elite dangerous, but it should be done in moderation… and definitely shouldn’t be required for 40 hours a week unless we get some really compelling studies.
Phones are different because your eyes are focusing at a point a foot in front of you, whereas in VR that shouldn’t be the case. You’re focusing on a simulated point a couple of meters out in the distance, though it is usually is still fixed.
Make no mistake, I’m not saying wearing VR for hours every day is healthy, for your eyes or otherwise, I’m only responding to your claim about screen brightness. I don’t think any VR displays have even hit 1000 nits yet, and on the displays that have, that’s peak brightness, the whole display can’t use all that energy at once, only small sections at a time. Meanwhile the sky is on the order of 10,000+ nits. The brightness of the sun will certainly hurt your eyes at over a billion nits.
I would love for an optometrist to explain why I’m wrong though.