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Frequently Asked Questions, Wearable Computing
Q. Don't you have trouble seeing in low light when you have a screen in front of your eyes all the time?

A. The brightness of the screen is automatically adjusted in response to the brightness of the scene. Thus the screen dims down in low ambient light. Back in the early 1980s, a colleague by the name of Kent Nickerson further suggested I put a red gel over my wearable display screen. In this way, the screen can be run a little brighter than the ambient light without desensing vision, which would otherwise require a short time period to return to full sensitivity. This suggestion was based on his belief that the eye's AGC was based on a sampling in the middle region of the spectrum (e.g. green). A blue filter would of course make it harder to read the screen, since blue is difficult to focus on. Thus after much experimentation, I decided to use red in low light. With a colour screen this selection is automatic. With Laser EyeTap, which is usually red already, the gel is not needed.

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