Hi everyone, I get terrible eye-strain, nausea and headaches from monitors and phones. For several years I haven't found a solution. I recently found an optometrist who diagnosed me with pattern glare, a optical/neurological condition that isn't very widely understood. I am wondering if anybody else has had any experience with this condition. The condition is typically associated with discomfort viewing stripes and repetitive contrasty scenes, however it appears that vision processing differences between the central field of focus and peripheral vision can cause similar effects. Screen flickering/dithering would logically amplify a discrepancy between central and peripheral vison. Another symptom is discomfort driving when motion occupies the field of vision, something that I personally also experience albeit on a lesser scale to screens. I am curious if anybody else experiences this as a symptom.

Sadly this doesn't describe me very well, so I can't be much use here. I can view almost ANYTHING if it's on a good device/screen combo.

a year later
10 days later

degen interesting to hear. Yes I also get worse symptoms at night or in high glare scenarios. When a specialist mentioned pattern glare to me he did mention that driving was a known trigger due to a disparity the brain's ability to process motion at the side of the field of vision. It's such a mystery!

I think I have this, sometimes I see horizontal lines after viewing images, I also remember years ago difficulty walking over a very long hallway area at university that was covered in horizontal patterned material (hard to explain but it was the material that door mats are made from? the hallway was essentially a corridoor that could be accessed from inside or out so had this material down to keep dirt / mud out etc), it would always irritate my eyes somewhat and I cant forget it because it was so strange each time I walked that area, but I put it down to lack of sleep / poor student diet etc at the time.

https://www.opticianonline.net/cet-archive/171 - this shows what I mean. Even looking at that picture is a bit odd for me

I also get migraines however it was years after university that they started.

I also found that wearing sunglasses all the time helped me - although I dont do this any more.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18565084

  • tsb replied to this.

    This has got me thinking about display sub-pixel arrangement, if its in lines....that could be why some screens affect people and others not (disregarding PWM)

    A few studies appear to have been done https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01651/full

    Says coloured tints / overlays can help. Personally I've tried gunnar glasses and they didnt help at all but maybe I need to read into this more.

    Example the Macbook pro seems to be arranged on horizontal lines: My retina mbp causes me lots of problems
    https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-13-Late-2013-Notebook.105035.0.html#toc-display

    Other such reviews dont make it clear if all screens are layed out that way though

      HAL9000 I have also tried tinted glasses to no avail. It would be interesting if the grid pattern is a part of the story... it's so hard to put it all together!

      4 days later

      Just a thought on this one, I've had a bit of a headache for a couple of days so havent been able to do much tinkering with settings etc but I think for me grey filters seem to help and I'm looking at ways of imitating 'reduce white point' that IOS has....that seems to 'draw' a grey filter over the screen to make the whites less bright. Reuducing brightness without reduce white point does not have the same effect - at least with me.

      Previoulsy I would get migraines outdoors if I didnt wear sunglasses and used to wear polarised sunglasses almost constantly (I've stopped now)

      so theres something there with filters. If my headache clears up I'll try looking at some patter glare tests with various levels of reduce white point.

      Otherwise my other thought was about colour blindness, if someone can be 'slightly' clourblind, not fully as in Red looks like Grey etc, but what if the Red (etc) that I see is not the same as the Red (etc) that someone else who doesnt have problems with screens etc sees....

      a month later

      I would like to bump this as I believe Pattern Glare is the issue many of us are experiencing and it may help to raise awareness. Not a lot is known about the condition but fundamentally it can manifest as a sensitivity to flickering and can be worsened through eye muscle strain. But it does seem to be the working term in the optometry field for a condition described by our symptoms. It is linked with migraines and can be brought on as a result of concussion or muscularskeletal stress, but not always. It is possible it may be brought on by ongoing eye stress. Few resources on it exist but a quick Google will reveal some info. A specialist I am seeing is heading up research on it.

      2 years later

      This is very interesting and something I'm going to be looking into. I have definitely found that I have strong feelings of motion that isn't there when I'm using an escalator, and a flickering candle can easily trigger a migraine in me.

      Both of these are mentioned in this paper as symptoms of pattern glare:

      The Pattern Glare Test: a review and determination of normative values - Evans - 2008 - Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics - Wiley Online Library

      Looking at the test patterns is very uncomfortable and causes them to bend and shimmer to me.

      The similarities with epilepsy are also interesting as after using very bad devices I have experienced something similar to Focal Aware Seizures - as described in this thread.

      9 months later

      Hi

      I Also get terrible eye-strain, nausea and headaches from monitors but ONLY when reading text because of pattern glare.

      Paragraph and line of text are like a pattern from Figure 4 from this site https://www.opticianonline.net/cpd-archive/171

      I also have it when reading on paper but way less.

      I did IRLEN testing and got tinted glasses (rose/purple) but it doesn't help. The overlay does help but mainly only on paper.

      You guys should look online about IRLEN which is kind of similar to people having pattern glare, it is also sometimes call visual stress.

      Opticalm are in this space and made a video that give some really nice recommandation. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrgAfiVA8Bw

      dev