Taking Action

kammerer So main point that root cause could be in neck muscle and blood channels that restrict proper blood feeding.

You adopt the same posture on any computer workstation so unless there's a physical reason I don't know how bloodflow could be affected by flickering.

One thing that is clear is that we are a minority. Nobody in my immediate family has issues, nor do friends IRL or people I know via Social Media.

However I am the only person I know of who has strabismus (heterotropia) and a significantly high prescription with prism correction (at least -8 in each eye). In my life I would say I've encountered less than 5 people with visible eye misalignment. My eye doctor has always said I am a 'unique case' - well, we all like to be unique at something .

It's not as if there are swarms of people having seizures or complaining of headaches using the latest tech, if there was a severe epidemic with users across the globe these issues would have been resolved by now.

I am using a 2019 Dell U2419H and have been using it for 2 months now. It's absolutely fine - I can use it for hours and hours without any issues. I am using my 2010 PC, though. This monitor is PWM-free and TUV-certified for low blue light, so I still had to carefully consider my monitor choice, but it isn't out of anybody's price bracket, and I'm using it fine. I do understand there is an even smaller minority with sensitivites to LED, but CCFL-tech is still perfectly usable for the next decade or so.

Another post has info on heterophoria, but that accounts for 10% of the population so I would have expected more people to be complaining about new technology.

I've had an MRI in the last 5 years, it came back normal. I've had many eye checks due to other issues and the eyes are healthy, and my prescription hasn't changed since I was a teenager.

Anyways, taking action; It's process of elimination to find the point of failure. I think Linux is a good place to start. Somebody out there has to know the kernel inside-out and will be able to explain how Linux DE's render the desktop, what type of dithering/artifacts are used, and how they can be removed. Linux is transparent, so a dithering/artifact free Linux could be a reality tomorrow, if we find the right programmer. If we then test and can all certify that we can run the 'fixed' distro on our good HW without issue, then we test on the bad HW. If the known good Linux distro on our good setup then has strain on the bad, then we're looking at a VBIOS issue or something baked into the HDMI output of new tech. Surely it's as simple as that, either the Driver/OS or VBIOS is producing this painful output. VBIOS could be the tricky issue - however if we KNOW we are running software which does not produce extra artifacts, we have eliminated any other root cause and can pressurise Nvidia et al with these findings.

martin 10% have it, but to what degree? The degree I have is less than 1%. Theres a spectrum of how much the eyes are deviated. So I believe we all here are a very rare extreme case of heterophoria, and also only the ones who try to find online solutions in english langauge and work with computers. Real life numbers are larger and time will show I think.

It would make sense why such a minority are complaining about modern tech. Maybe we could post on /r/strabismus as there are about 1000 users subscribed there, we could very quickly determine if other people with strabismus are facing the same problems.

I'm inclined to agree that this is more and more looking like a 'lack of true binocular fusion' barrier of entry > from what I've read in most cases of heterophoria fusion is still happening 99% of the time but it can be broken e.g. with the cross cover test - so essentially this tech is doing the same thing? I have strabismus (heterotropia) which effectively is worse than heterophoria as no fusion is made at any point.

tfouto What OS do you use?

I'm back to using Windows 7 Home Premium on my old Acer 2010 desktop. For me right now it seems any Intel integrated desktop 2010 and previous is good - obviously need to use Windows 7 and older drivers - I'm using Feb 2010 drivers!

There must be some stereoscopic behaviour in modern devices - the question is - why?

I've been posting on Reddit to seek more opinions and also to promote this forum.

I got a reply from a post on /r/optometry, presumably from a working professional.

I've yet to find any compelling evidence LED is any worse for people's eyes than any other light source. Just anecdotes that don't hold up to even mild testing.

The more likely culprit is improvement in visual Fidelity with technology. Video games and movies are viewed on larger higher resolution screens, with high refresh rate. Modern video games are capable of reproducing visual cues like lighting and fog that make them more realistic and immersive than ever. Even cartoon style games are buttery smooth and immersive. Even the modern UI has elements of depth and realism to them. Smart phone screens use AMOLED displays which create more immersive and true colors, especially with darker tones in images.

This is great and the desired effect, but for some individuals the virtual reality of the device crashes with the reality of what going on around you and suddenly your brain is processing conflicting information about it's place in the world. This is disturbing enough for some individuals to cause nausea.

What I will agree with, and know anecdotally, is that I do get motion sickness with certain video games (but never get travel sick). For those of you old enough to remember the original Wolfenstein 3D, that game made me go crazy after 2 minutes, and that is a 30 year old DOS game. So it would be trivial nowadays for that type of effect to be baked into a UI to make it appear more 3D - maybe we're all getting 'motion-sickness lite' as a result of the new stereoscopic effects?

I have filed a bug on Ubuntu Launchpad to try and disable dithering, it's not been assigned to anybody yet but I will keep checking back for updates.

I've also been posting on some subreddits (/r/strabismus, r/optometry) to try and get advice from others, unfortunately there has not been a big response.

I'm not giving up, but (part rant) I'm fed up of this BS. I haven't been employed for quite some time now, why would I want to work on a computer all day if I'm 'stuck' on my good machine which is over a decade old? My lovely new NUC is sitting here which would be a real aid to my personal life (music production/graphic design) and also as a media player/games console. Even on good devices, it seems that app by app or update by update, things are breaking and becoming unusable fast.

I'm not trying to sound pessimistic, but we can't live on years old software and hardware forever. I understand that everybody has their own lives but how do you all work right now? Don't you get really bad symptoms?

If I went to a doctor today and said "I can't work in an office anymore because of XYZ causing me eye strain" - as it's not even a medically recognised condition, I get no support from the state (I'm based in the UK). I could get a job away from technology (a cleaner, teacher, shop assisstant) however I shouldn't have to resort to this much of a change, just because of a software update.

I may be a part of a minority, and I'm very grateful that we can share our experiences, but these companies have so much to answer for if updates are causing individuals like myself to have these sort of reactions.

Peter In the UK there is what is known as the 'Small Claims Court' in which an individual can take legal action against a company. However in order for any legal proceedings to be effective, it would have to be categorically proven that the discomfort came from 'exhibit A'. Herein is the issue; almost every tech company are now using these rendering/display techniques. So it's not just 'the people vs Apple' or 'vs Intel', it's the offending output that's the issue.

Peter Regarding the option of building a legal case, all my legal contacts (UK and Greece) told me that it seems difficult due to the uniqueness of the symptoms to each person.

This is the problem, and it is frustrating as everybody here must feel as if they're on their own with their unique set of symptoms. One thing we all have in common here is none of us can find anything modern that works. Do all modern devices use dithering/pixel movement that is different to a decade ago? I think so, it's just a matter of proving that with hard evidence. What I hope to gain re: Ubuntu/Linux (if we can get that far) is a proof-of-concept to see what happens when running a dithering-free OS/Driver for extended hours. Do our symptoms go away? Are they 50% better? We don't know for certain until everything from OS>Driver>GPU>Display is accounted for.

Looking at the Intel support forums (Windows), there's lots of reports of incorrect color depth being detected for displays, and users complaining they can't select 10/12 bit color. Also a few requests to disable dithering.

Thread - https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P00004VyUR0SAN/10bit-bit-depth-hevc-with-iris-plus-graphics-650?language=en_US

Our driver supports Color Depths of 8-bit or 12-bit via HDMI*.
Currently, if a 10-bit display is used the driver will default to 8-bit with Dithering or 12-bit if supported.
Please refer to Deep Color Support of Intel Graphics White Paper. (Page 11)
There is already a request to allow users to manually select desired Color Depth via IGCC (Intel® Graphics Command Center), but this is a work in progress with no ETA however it is in our Top priority list.
The above doesn't impact at all the Encoding/Decoding capabilities of the graphics controller. HEVC 10-bit video encoding/decoding via Hardware is supported by the graphics controller.

There was another post I saw, and forget the link, but the support answer was that the driver automatically enables dithering for 8Bit and above, and disables for 6bit. Which seems backwards, as a poster pointed out. Is there a way to spoof or rewrite an EDID to be detected as 6bit?

Intel Deep Color White Paper - https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/deep-color-support-graphics-paper.pdf

Most of the traditional laptop panels were internally of 6bpc (=18bpp panels). This naturally means even a normal 24bpp image can show dithering when viewed on an 18bpp panel. To avoid this, a process called “dithering” is applied which is almost like introducing a small noise to adjoining pixel. This will create variations in 18bit representation and results in hiding color banding on such panels. Either the GPU’s display HW or panel itself might do this. When a panel does this, source (GPU display HW) is not aware of the same and panel will advertise itself as a normal 8bpc (24bit) panel

So I gather from this that the reason dithering is always enabled is a failsafe to avoid a poor 6bit+frc implementation. Which in a way makes sense because there could be very cheap monitors out there that are advertised as 8bit but are 6bit+frc (as we know), so the dithering at the GPU side is ensuring a consistent 8bit output across all monitors.

Windows* OS doesn’t support more than 8 bpc for desktop. This means even if an application has a more than 8 bpc content, it will all be compressed to 8 bpc during desktop window composition process as shown in figure below

So perhaps all these applications that are starting to cause strain are designed with HDR in mind, however they are being dithered down to 8bpc?

In many respects I can understand why dithering is enabled. It's much easier to just force all displays to 8-bit rather than have the possibility of an incorrectly detected monitor/color combo. However I think that advanced controls should still be available to the consumer as dithering on a true 8-bit monitor will produce extra noise when it isn't needed. So I'm not getting what I pay for as a consumer. So eye strain or not, dithering isn't needed if the monitor is detected correctly and correct color range is selected.