Can Wearing Virtual Reality Goggles and Smart Glasses Actually Damage Your Eyes?

As a Lifehacker smart glasses and VR expert, I’m taking a plot time flooding my eyes with a bright light. Last night I was testing a pair of soon-to-be-released screen-style glasses that emit 1,200 nits of light. It’s about the brightness of a car headlight, squeezed into a postage stamp-sized image projected on glass about a half-inch from my eyes. I was like, “Wait, am I fry my eyes?”

So I called Dr. Sunir Garg, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and professor of ophthalmology at Wills Eye Hospital, and asked him bluntly: What am I doing to my eyes with this stuff? “We don’t think much,” replied Garg. “If the light doesn’t physically force you to look away – if it’s a bright screen but it’s not uncomfortable – we don’t think it’s going to harm the eye.”

There isn’t much research on the long-term effects of VR headsets on vision, but the available data doesn’t raise alarms among eyecare professionals. According to the AAO, ophthalmologists agree that there is no reason to worry that VR headsets and/or smart glasses will harm eye health, function, or development.

To close the matter, I asked Garg if he had ever seen or heard of any eye injuries due to virtual reality, and he said: “The only scenario [in which] We’ve seen eye injuries when people are doing something like boxing and tripping over the coffee table, falling and hitting their heads.

How young is too young to use virtual reality?

“But what about children” you might ask (you’re wringing your hands). Good news here, too: VR headset makers may have age-based guidelines for their products – Meta recommends a minimum age of 10 for its headsets, and Apple says its Vision Pro shouldn’t be used by children under 13 – but they’re not based on vision research. “There’s not a lot of data to suggest that VR headsets pose a problem for children,” said Garg “I think we’ll have to kind of hit. [Meta and Apple] “We don’t know where this justification comes from,” Garg said, “because it’s not something we really care about, per se.”

There is also no reason to believe that VR headsets cause long-term vision problems in children, but if a child stays indoors all day using VR, it could lead to nearsightedness. It’s not from VR, it’s the “being inside” part. “Being outside with natural sunlight appears to help regulate the growth of the eye and reduce the degree of myopia that people might be at risk of developing,” Garg said.

So it seems there’s some truth to the old trope of bookworms wearing glasses. However, exactly why being a child indoors correlates with myopia is unclear; further research needs to be done.

Virtual reality can cause eye strain, however

Even if VR equipment and smart glasses don’t Shame your eyes, they can still cause uncomfortable eye strain. According to Garg, when you use virtual reality or look at a digital screen, your eyes don’t move much and you tend to blink less, causing your eyes to dry out, which can lead to eye irritation and fatigue.

“The solution to this problem is to either consciously move your eyes, blink a little more consciously, or follow the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s “20/20/20 rule.” » Simply put: When using any type of screen, every 20 minutes you should look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds.

Motion sickness and dizziness in virtual reality

Besides eye strain, common pitfalls of using VR can include headaches, dizziness, and nausea. While your vision may have something to do with these things, the main cause of widespread harm in VR seems to be the inner ear, not the eyes. “Some people are just very sensitive to the movement component of virtual reality,” Garg said. “I don’t quite understand how much of it comes from the eyeballs.”

Your eyes can handle 1,200 nits because they’re tough

Bottom line: The available evidence suggests that your eyes won’t be harmed if you go crazy with VR, as long as you take breaks from time to time and blink enough to avoid discomfort. It’s too late for us to salvage our 20/20 vision by getting more sunlight as kids, but at least we won’t burn our eyes out — and it’s reassuring to know that the biggest health risk from using VR is barking your shins on the coffee table.