Virtual reality has been around for a good few years now and what is still a relative niche product, devices like the Oculus quest by Facebook are fast making many people take a second look at VR. Now, with increased adoption inevitably comes the question of, what are these headsets and these devices doing to our eyes? I mean, it’s bad enough when we think about mobile phones and monitors that we use at about arm’s length and what harm could these headsets that sit right in front of our eyes be doing on a long term basis? Well, in this blog post, we will be getting to the bottom of that We’ll also be deciding whether blue light blindness is even a genuine threat.
Now Facebook has their way, then in just a few short years, we could all be trading in our regular morning commute into the office for putting on our VR headsets and working virtually from home while wearing our boxer shorts and vest. If you’re anything like me, then you too probably would have been sceptical about the value of VR over the years. However, in search of a more entertaining way to keep fit, I turned to the Oculus quest and I have to say it’s proved to be mightily impressive for fitness and entertainment, but surprisingly also for some productivity use cases as well.
One of my concerns with VR that I’m sure many people share is the risk that it might pose to your sight, having such a bright monitor so close to your eyes and for potentially hours per session. I mean, when we think about all the headlines that we’ve all heard over the years about blue light potentially causing damage to your vision and possibly affecting your sleep patterns, it’s only logical to conclude, I think, that these concerns will be even more relevant when we look at VR headsets.
Well, straight off the bat, I’m going to let you know that on the face of it, my research into the topic does suggest that when it comes to VR headsets causing damage to your eyes and possible sight loss, there’s no obvious danger to worry about, so you might well be breathing a sigh of relief at this point, but not so fast. I do think there are cautions that we all need to consider in some situations, and I’ll cover that later on.
Now, as far as I’m aware, there is no specific where that I can refer you to on the safety of your headsets for the eyes, so I’ve had to look at some of the available thinking on LED displays for mobile phones and PC screens and extrapolate that to VR headsets, so let’s take a look at how we can arrive at our conclusion.
Now we go to Organisation for Research and Safety, to do with the radiation that you and I may come in contact with is the International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection. It’s a mouthful, I know, and you’ll be glad to also know that they usually just referred to by the acronym, which is the ICNIRP, so I’m going to leave a link to their website at the end of this post, so do check that out, there’s a wealth of information there that you can look to for reference.
ICNIRP has looked at the possible harm that blue light emitted from LED displays can cause and made their thoughts and conclusions available, so let’s have a look at some of their thoughts and also their conclusions. In the website there’s a lot to check out here, but I’m going to focus specifically on a document that you can find here on the safety implications of light-emitting diodes, also known as LEDs. I leave you a direct link to this document from the website below the description box as well so definitely check that out and.
There’s a lot of things that are way beyond the scope of what we are interested in for this blog post but I’ve highlighted 10 points to touch on and so we’ll look through those in this post and then for the rest of the blog post, I’ll give you my conclusions and how this is all relevant to VR and there are some tips to protect your eyes when using your VR headset.
Point 1: Talks about the fact that it’s a well-known fact that some related retinal burns is a possibility but interestingly, they do highlight the fact that the human eye is very well adapted for the protection against normal bright sunlight conditions.
Point 2: Is the fact that we have natural protection reflex that makes us want to look away from dangerously bright lights, so it’s important to pay attention to kind of your feelings of discomfort around lights, because it’s your kind of body telling you that this is getting too much for me.
Point 3: The authors state that it used to be thought that retinal burns or sun-related retinal damage only happened because of heat generated from higher wavelengths in the spectrum, but the work of Ham and others in 1976 showed that you can get damaged at the back of your eyes, not just because of the heat that you might feel, but blue light may not generate any heat, but it can cause up to a thousand times more damage than, some of the wavelengths that we previously thought and linked with heat could cause.
Point 4: the research also found that by filtering out the short wavelengths or the blue light, the damage can be reduced, so blue-blocking lenses and things like that could be beneficial.
Point 5: The site, Professor O’Hagan and his team, and measured the amount of blue light emitted from LED devices such as smartphones, tablets and computers with traditional incandescent light bulbs and then they compare that to the sky as well. And they found that these devices admitted up to two to three times more blue light than the incandescent light bulb but surprisingly, they found that these devices are released 25 to 200 times less blue light than you find and you can experience a clear blue summer sky in the UK. So that’s just some powerful insight into just how small the amount of blue light that is emitted from our devices are really.
Now, the work of Professor John O’Hagan is often cited in many press and media articles on blue light, so one of Professor O’Hagan’s roles is as head of the laser and optical radiation dosimetry group of the government organisation that we know as Public Health England in the UK.
For more details about how he does his measurements and his experiments on kind of the impact of devices on vision and the blue light emission, then do check out this link to a presentation that he did. I’ll leave a link to that at the end of this blog post for you to check out.
Point 6: They compare LEDs to lasers, and the conclusion is that from a safety point of view, LEDs are much safer under normal use case conditions and this is unlike the UV range of spectrum of LEDs that could be a bit more harmful.
Point 7: He made a point here that animal studies can be found that show the blue light emitted from LEDs can be dangerous. However, conditions that these animals in the studies were put through are considered extreme in the human context and those scenarios just wouldn’t be typical of how humans get exposed.
Point 8: He highlighted the fact that newborn babies and young children from age two or less, as well as elderly people, are more at risk of biological effects of blue light LEDs.
Point 9: Here is an important point that raises awareness of the fact that very bright screens will expose your retina to higher levels of short-wavelength blue light, so you should pay attention to your comfort levels and if it seems uncomfortable to your eyes, this is probably a good indication that there is more risk of harm to your eyes.
Point 10: Is that white LEDs don’t emit much UV compared to fluorescent lamps, for example, this can be taken as a good indication and a good positive health indication of these LEDs compared to other light sources that release a lot more UV, which is also harmful.
So what does all this mean for you budding VR fans out there that want to make use of this information?
Firstly, it must be said that this work does relate mainly to the impact of smartphone screens are worked on at about 30 centimetres from you and VR screens, in contrast, are usually about 5 centimetres away from your eyes. VR screens all tend to use the same form of LED or organic LED or led technology, so it’s relevant from that point of view.
Now, the ICNIRP have set limits for safe blue light emissions for devices and Professor O’Hagan explains in this lecture that smartphones being used at 30 centimetres would only reach about a maximum of 4.0% of the maximum recommended safe level by the ICNIRP. Taking this figure and extrapolating it, we might be able to deduce that since 30 centimetres divided by 5 is 6, then for VR screen that is 5 centimetres away, we can expect that blue light emission experience will be 6 times greater than from a smartphone that’s 30 centimetres away and that will make the blue light exposure experience 24.48% of the maximum ICNIRP recommended level.
Even with that being considered, it’s well within the safe limits, especially when we think about the fact that most people won’t always be using the maximum brightness on their VR headsets and most people won’t be looking at a constant white screen or even a bright environment within VR, which are all the kind of conditions that Professor O’Hagan and his team kind of conducted the experiments in.
So before you all switch me off and start playing on your working on your VR headsets, here are some tips to keep you extra safe and protected from blue light damage while using your VR headsets.
- Keep the brightness down as much as you can. Probably 75% would be sufficient.
- Keep your maximum daily sessions to about 3 hours and that’s because Professor O’Hagan and his team based a lot of their work on 3 hour daily sessions or 10,000 seconds and the Oculus quest too has I know a battery life run about 2 hours, I try and keep your sessions in daily sessions to about the lifespan of the battery.
- Avoid long periods of white screen viewing, this might include things like word processing, looking at a word document or even websites that just have a lot of white or even background environments where it’s very white and you spend a long time in those environments.
- VR for young children should be a no and seniors, while they should freely enjoy VR, should also be careful to perhaps reduce their session times down and keep the brightness of the display down as well. This is particularly important if they have a history themselves or a family history of macular degeneration.
- Use the night shift mode on your headset if it has one and you know this is particularly important working during night-time sessions so that it doesn’t disrupt your sleep patterns and also if you’re planning on doing kind of a word document for a while or anything like that, then using my shift mode helps to filter out the blue light and which is healthy for your eyes and help visual comfort as well.
- Don’t overly be worried. Remember that your eyes have natural protection built-in that allows them to absorb normal levels of blue light safely and remember also that there’s always a way more blue light and even UV when you’re out and about on a beautiful, clear day than what you’ll ever find in your VR headset.
Let me know in the comments section below if you love yourself a bit of VR and if you’ve had any concerns about your eyes while using your VR headsets?
Helpful Links discussed
1. ICNIRP website: https://www.icnirp.org/
2. LED implications for safety statement – Direct doc link: https://www.icnirp.org/cms/upload/pub…
3. John O’Hagan lecture on blue light hazard: https://www.osa.org/en-us/meetings/we…
Recommended videos
My vision hacks playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO…
Stop eyelid twitches: https://youtu.be/WdqKYUyrQbE
Blue blocker glasses review: https://youtu.be/fjVxMuv9NS4
Thanks for reading and until the next one guys, take care.
