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

As Lifehacker’s smart glasses and virtual reality expert, I spend a lot of time flooding my eyes with bright light. Last night, I was testing a pair of soon-to-be released display style glasses that blast out 1,200 nits of light. That’s roughly car-headlight-bright, squeezed into a postage-stamp-sized image projected on glass about a half inch from my eyes. I thought to myself, “Wait, am I frying my eyeballs?” 

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

There’s not a ton of research on the long-term effects of VR headsets on vision, but the data out there isn’t raising alarms among eye professionals. According to the AAO, ophthalmologists agree that there is no reason to be concerned that VR headsets and/or smart glasses will damage eye health, function, or development. 

To close the case, I asked Garg whether he’d ever seen or heard of any eye injuries from virtual reality, and he said, “The only scenario [in which] we've seen eye injuries is when people were doing something like boxing and tripped over the coffee table and fell down and hit their head.”

How young is too young for using virtual reality? 

“But what about the children?” you might be asking (you hand-wringer, you). Good news there too: Virtual reality headset manufacturers may have age-based guidelines for their products—Meta recommends a minimum age of 10 years for its headsets, and Apple says its Vision Pro should not be used by children under 13—but they aren’t based on research about eyesight. “There’s not a lot of data that suggests that the VR headsets are problematic for kids,” Garg said. “I think we'll have to kind of hit [Meta and Apple] up for where that justification is coming from,” Garg said, ”because it's not something that we are really concerned about, per se.”

There’s also no reason to think virtual reality helmets cause long-term vision problems in kids, but if a child is inside all day using VR, it could lead to nearsightedness. It’s not from the VR though—it’s the "being inside" part. “Something about being outside with natural sunlight seems to help regulate the growth of the eye and helps to reduce the amount of near-sightedness that people could be at risk of developing,” Garg said.

So it seems there's some truth to the old trope of bookworms wearing glasses. Exactly why being an indoor-kid correlates with nearsightedness isn’t clear though; more research needs to be done. 

Virtual reality can cause eyestrain, though

Even if VR gear and smart glasses don’t damage your eyes, they can still cause uncomfortable eyestrain. According to Garg, when you’re using VR or staring at any digital screen, your eyes are not moving much and you tend to blink less, so your eyes dry out, and that can lead to irritation and eyestrain. 

“The fix for that is either moving your eyes around consciously, blinking a bit more consciously, or following the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s ’20/20/20 rule.’” That is: When using any kind 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 

Along with eyestrain, common pitfalls of using VR can include headaches, dizziness, and nausea. While your vision might have something to do with these things, the main cause of general VR sickness seems to be the inner ear, not the eyes. “Some people are just really sensitive to the motion component of virtual reality,” Garg said, “It's less clear to me how much of it is from the eyeballs.” 

Your eyes can handle 1,200 nits because they are tough

To sum up: Available evidence suggests your eyes will not be damaged if you go crazy with the VR, as long as you take breaks every once in a while and blink enough to avoid discomfort. It’s too late for us to save our 20/20 vision by soaking up more sunlight as a child, but at least we're not frying our eyeballs—and it’s reassuring to know that the biggest health risk from using virtual reality is barking your shins on the coffee table.

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