
Viewing Angle and Distance in Computer Workstations (1994) - walterbell
http://www.allscan.ca/ergo/vangle.htm
======
leoc
Those preferred viewing angles from Hill and Kroemer (
[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140138608967228](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00140138608967228)
?) seem distinctly low. My uneducated guess is that those results, from people
asked to use computer workstations in 1986, probably reflect hunt-and-peck
typists' need to move their eyes frequently between keyboard and screen. That
leaves you in basically the same situation as a seated touchscreen user or
seated pen-and-paper draughtsman, for whom a diagonally sloped work surface is
the best compromise between the near-vertical viewing angle of a cinema screen
and the need to see your hands while avoiding gorilla arm. (While the dead-
level surface of most modern desks is mostly optimised for piling crap on.)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444990)
For touch typing I assume that a more cinema-like viewing angle is better.

~~~
qwerty_asdf
These days, though, there's an odd mix of typists, because everyone is self
taught, and most people have begun typing as soon as they learn how to read
and write.

Both touch typing and hunt and peck typing are in severe decline. Mobile
devices have created all kinds of mutants, and no one gives a shit about "
_the home row_ " anymore. I watch those old videos about posture and training
oneself to type without looking at the keyboard by typing endless garbage over
and over, and I have to laugh, because I've never seen anything less important
seem like such obvious brainwashing.

~~~
lordfoom
>because I've never seen anything less important seem like such obvious
brainwashing.

I take it you're not a touch typist? What kind of wpm do you get?

~~~
qwerty_asdf
WPM is an archaic metric, and as my top speed I target only a reasonable
conversational pace in chat windows, comparable to verbal conversation.
Anything more is kind of a waste. As long as people don't feel like my pace of
typing is lagging during a chat, I don't really need to be much faster than
that.

I don't have a problem meeting those demands, and composing my thoughts, and
contemplating what I wish to type usually consumes more time than the act of
typing itself.

Bandwidth measured in bytes probably makes more sense these days. But again, I
haven't bothered to measure how fast I type, other than a gut intuition for
how often I get sniped in chat rooms, when people beat me and say something
before I can, alongside how impatient people seem to get with me.

------
walterbell
Key findings:

 _" Every one of the subjects ... judged the eye to screen distance of 20
inches to be too close. All accepted a 40 inch distance. Grandjean reported an
average preferred viewing distance of 30 inches ... the closer the object, the
more downward people wanted to look. When the target was 40 inches away, the
preferred viewing angle was -30 degrees. When the target was moved in to 20
inches, the downward preference increased to -38 degrees. The head was not
permitted to move during these tests, so the downward gaze angle was caused
solely by movement of the eyes."_

In a multi-monitor system, each monitor can have a different distance and font
size, to avoid the eye being locked into a single focal distance for many
hours. In a single-monitor system, vary the distance between user/keyboard and
monitor.

~~~
Stratoscope
That's fine for young people. But at age 65, my eyes do not have the ability
yours may to focus at a variety of different distances.

I use and recommend a pair of single vision computer glasses. These are
adjusted to let my eyes focus on a screen 20" away, which happens to be my
viewing distance for a laptop in normal use. My eyes are completely relaxed
when viewing a screen at that distance.

I could have picked any other distance, like the farther distances discussed
in the article, but then I would be stuck at that viewing distance. I wouldn't
be able to use a laptop display at all but would have to always use an
external display placed farther away.

Since I do want to be able to use the laptop all by itself, e.g. when
traveling, I had my glasses made for that 20" laptop viewing distance.

So when I use a second monitor alongside my main laptop display (like the
portrait mode 24" 4K monitor I use next to my high-DPI ThinkPad or MacBook at
my home office), that monitor _must_ be close to the same 20" distance, or it
will be out of focus and I won't be able to use it comfortably.

~~~
walterbell
Have you seen magnetic reader clip-ons where the additional lens is custom
made and positioned to match the curve of your distance lens?

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