What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses instead of just turning one’s computer display’s blue lights off or very low in spaces where there are no other sources of blue light than the screen the person is watching? Suppose that the person has perfect visual acuity without eyeglasses. Suppose also that all other possible protective measures achieved by the blue light eyeglasses are achieved by other means, such as by using UV filtering eyeglasses of the same shape and frame material and frame color as the blue light eyeglasses assuming that the blue light eyeglasses do have such protection. Economic, ease of use, technical savviness, time needed to configure the display or other such reasons are out of scope of the question. Other situations where there is blue light are also out of scope just as the overall harm caused by blue light.
Blue is the B in RGB. It’s an essential wavelength used by RBG or RGBW (which includes white pixels) displays in order to accurately reproduce the various colors we want to look at. They are carefully blended together to reproduce billions of different colors.
Blue light has a higher frequency than red or green light, so prolonged exposure can be fatiguing on the eyes. But this usually requires many, many hours of screen time over many days - which I suppose is quite common for a lot of people. There are other factors which arguably contribute more to eye strain though such as uneven backlight strobing which can be an issue for lower quality displays.
The reason you can’t just turn the blue light off is you wouldn’t be able to accurately produce a ton of colors. Even if you aren’t necessarily viewing something with a ton of blue color in it at the time, removing all blue light from the equation would alter most of the other colors that you ARE looking at. There are software solutions such as f.lux that try to reduce strain by lowering blue light and compensate by raising “gentler” wavelengths, but they produce a visibly warmer, more yellowed effect which can be less than ideal in some scenarios.
Wouldn’t glasses do the same thing (produce warmer/sepia colors)?
As far as I know, yes some do - but I have also seen some that don’t have nearly as drastic affect on the colors you look at.
Take this with a grain of salt because I don’t know a ton about light filtering glasses, but I’m pretty sure that some of the more “color accurate” ones work by having polarizing lenses that don’t allow certain wavelengths of blue light through the lenses. Whereas the more sepia-tinted ones just apply that sepia tone filter across the lenses. Still, neither one totally blocks all of the blue light because that would drastically alter the viewing experience to make it unpleasant/unviewable. Try going into your monitor’s color settings and setting B all the way to 0 and see how it fucks up all the other, non-blue colors.
I believe the general guidance is high quality filtering glasses > software solutions. But I would only worry about it if it’s an actual problem that you struggle with. I personally run f.lux every night at sundown, but it’s on a very mild setting that you wouldn’t really notice unless you toggle it on and off.
I wear blue light filtering glasses for working at my desk. You can order them with varying intensity, and there’s some visible differences with higher strength, but often you don’t really notice the difference after a while.
The idea with them isn’t necessarily to filter out all blue light, it’s to filter out some of it, to hopefully reduce some of the strain over a long period, not necessarily to block all blue light at once. It’s also useful on nights when I’m working before bed, because one thing they have proven is that blue light fucks with sleep cycles.
They’re not safety goggles, they’re more like sun screen. It’s gonna get through, but not as much, and that makes a difference over long time frames.