anon123 I'll check it out. I have visual snow, but it's pretty mild. Noise pattern definitely does something. The plan is to package the different overlays in some app where others can experiment as well.
I've tried a lot of things and I'm sure there are modifications that can be done that either provide relief, or assist in some sort of adaptation. I usually use a shadow around the edge of the screen and feel that it helps quite a bit. I've also experimented with what changes prevents visual distortions from happening, as it is easily testable to see when patterns are blinking and not. Diagonal patterns can also be used to remove botching thar is present on Mac.
Tbh after spending a lot of time with overlays on scaled resolutions on Mac I'm getting the feel that it's the closest you can get to living inside a compressed jpg hellhole. Just try the inverted framebuffer in BetterDisplay if anyone wants to see just how much shit there is. Currently I only do retina or native scaling, but need to get a 220 ppi monitor to make it better.
Apart from this there is a lot of things that can give pixel inversion flicker. Especially when not using scaled resolutions that smooths out things. Overlays can mitigate some of this.
I do need to find a way to do more advanced overlays tho, as there is no reason you couldn't do shaders that doesn't shade images, or just affects pure whites. Mening you could make everything feel like paper without breaking images, or just pattern all white backgrounds.
I also think there is benefit to be gained from shifting whites and blacks differently. For example adjusting the gamma curve so blacks are more blue and whites are more red, or applying different patterns on them.
I've been pondering a bit around adaptation after seeing this where they have shown adaptations for months after minutes of exposure. https://michaelbach.de/ot/col-McCollough/
This is also super interesting in relation to high gamut colors on high contrast displays. At a certain threshold you get the depth effect that might be contributing. They also note something about the size of pixels and the wavelengths for it to happen. Might be one more clue as to why certain screens work better. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00337/full