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This thing didn't make sense to me before. Why create a read-only device when you have a perfectly good screen on your phone? But anyone who has a Kindle knows half the answer to this question. This is the backlight on your smartphone, right? This is what strains your eyes. Well, I tried low brightness, high light on, backlight, lamp, dark mode. I've tried everything. The fact that this low-tech screen is still better for reading than this fancy OLED is just the tip of the iceberg. There seems to be a much bigger problem with our bodies. I really wanted to get on the VR flight simulator train, but I couldn't because every time I fly, I feel like I'm being thrown out the window, which is actually just my floor. Why is it that the more technology tries to be
real, the more our bodies reject it? And is there anything we can do about it? Is this a body problem or a technical problem? Which, by the way, doesn't stop big tech companies or car companies from now implementing AR VR technologies everywhere. I just wanted to play Flight Simulator VR, man. But I've found that tech companies try to ignore these technical flaws and limitations and blame us for the headaches they cause. So let's unravel the boundaries of our meat suit. Okay, so let's get back to these two, because this screen, this screen has a major fatal flaw that OLED manufacturers have been cunningly hiding for decades. You've probably heard that an OLED screen works by making each pixel its own light source, unlike, say, an LED
screen, where you have a bright panel that lights everything up. Each pixel on an OLED screen will actually be three indicators: red, green, and blue. These are actually red, green, and blue indicators. This is not some lead painted a certain color. They use organic chemicals to emit this color. Hence the name OLED - organic light emitting diode. To make them glow, you need to apply voltage to each of them. So they glow, and the more current you apply, the greater the brightness, of course. Now if you turn off the power, they all turn off and you get those perfect blacks that everyone talks about on all their screens. But, as I said, there is a fatal flaw in this system. Please note that the voltage for each of them is different.
This is because the wavelengths of each light are different. The problem is that red light has a long relaxed wavelength. Green is shorter, and blue is the shortest of the three wavelengths, about 450 nanometers. So, blue needs more voltage because blue carries much more energy. So what does this have to do with your headaches? Is this a technical problem or a problem with the body? By the way, there is another item of everyday technology that causes a completely different kind of headache. Mostly because almost no one knows how to use it properly, and it's AI. Most people treat AI as this smarter search box, and you ask it a question,
look at the text, and close the tab. If that's all you do with AI, you're missing the point of the most powerful tool on your laptop. That's why today we're partnering with Outskll for their two-day masterclass on artificial intelligence. I was actually there last week, and it's a complete immersion into what these things can actually do once you get past the search bar version. So over the weekend, they will teach you how to conduct in-depth research that breaks down a topic into pieces in minutes, rather than a whole day with tabs open. You will learn how to create your own toolbars without code. You will set up background automation so that your admin system, your mailbox, your repetitive busy work just work on their own. This effectively
puts most of your week on autopilot, and you get mentorship directly from leaders at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia. For our audience, they're making it completely free for the first thousand people who sign up. You will also receive three free bonuses when you join, namely: an AI hint library, a personalized tool builder, and 50 frameworks to turn AI into a high- level tool. I promise that what you learn in these two days will change the way you work. You can scan this QR code or follow the link in the description to secure your spot and join the WhatsApp community before they disappear. So what's with the blue, those OLED screens, and headaches? Now, if I want to make this screen less bright and I just proportionally
reduce the amount of current I'm sending to them, there will be a point where the blue light just disappears and you're left with just red and green, which, if you remember from kindergarten, red and green make brown. But when we deal with light, it produces yellow. In other words, blue requires minimal current to operate, making the minimum brightness too bright. So, how do you make a screen that you can scroll through before bed? The secret is that instead of dimming the light below the desired voltage, which again will only kill the blue light at first, you make the light flicker. And if you don't believe me, I can show you. Here's the iPhone at full brightness in slow motion.
Without flicker. But if you turn down the brightness, do you see it? See that flicker? This is called PWM. This is pulse-modulated because all three subpixels, red, green, and blue, are simply pulsing, creating the illusion of lower brightness. The reason why viewing these screens at night causes eye strain is because your eyes are suffering from this PWM hack. Your eye muscles actually react to keep up with the pulsation. And very ironically, none of this happens with the cheap Kindle, because the ink display doesn't emit any light at all. So you need a good old lamp, like in the old legendary paper days, paper technology. But OLED, OLED was our best choice for realistic colors, right? And the first piece of the puzzle for my
headache is playing Flight Simulator. But this is just the beginning. So, if you're perhaps too young to remember, these are old-school 3D glasses. A good way to trick our eyes, to make them see something that resembles reality, but it's not. And Hollywood has done everything it can to shove this stuff down our throats. How to Train Your Dragon in 3D. But, simply put, people don't like 3D, right? It strains the eyes. It makes my head spin. It's just not worth the extra money for a ticket. But why do people hate him so much? 3D movies are rubbish. They will lose this horribly. This is terrible we can see reality in three dimensions is because we have two eyes. So the image on the left
eye is slightly different from the image on the right eye. And over almost a lifetime of looking at things in the real world, our brains have learned to be really good at putting these two images together and interpreting the depth of these images. Now, back in the 1800s, one guy figured out that by showing each eye a slightly different image, you could simulate 3D. This is what any 3D glasses do. Filter one image for the left eye and another, slightly different image for the right eye. But why do so many people suffer from headaches from 3D? So when you try to watch, I don't know, Spider-Man in 3D, uh, you're tricking your eyes with this weird paradox. So watching a 3D movie will require your eyes to do two things that
they are usually very, very good at. First, it will be convergence. So that's when your eyes turn inward to point to whatever you're tracking, like your finger. That's what happens, of course, when you bring that finger close to your face. Your eyes will cross. For objects that are far away, of course, your eyes will be parallel. The second thing you do is called accommodation, which is kind of like focusing. So inside each eye, behind the pupil, there's a tiny fleshy lens, and you have muscles that make it change shape to be able to focus on objects that are near or far away. This is why, for example, if you look at your finger up close, in addition to your eyes squinting, the world around you will appear more blurry. This is a
focusing situation. So, in the real world, in a regular video, these two elements will always work in sync. Every time, throughout your life, your eyes will focus on a screen. Your convergence, or your accommodation, is in one place. But in a 3D movie, your convergence will start on the screen when the movie starts, but it will move closer to you as you focus on that 3D effect, whatever it is coming off the screen, but your accommodation won't move. Your accommodation should remain fixed on the screen. Your attention should be focused on the screen. This is called the accommodation conflict, and it has been destroying Hollywood's dreams of more expensive movie tickets for decades. Because how they tried. This is the third time Hollywood has tried to
do this. Their first attempt was in the early 1950s with the films "Buena Diavolo" or "House of Wax". They used polarized glasses to do this, and they went from lining up around the corner to watch this 3D stunt to getting rid of it completely a few years later. And again, they did it in the 1980s, in the films "Friday the 13th" and "Jaws 3D." They used the same glasses, 30 years later, trying to sell that effect again. Same decision and same headache. And now we watch the third attempt collapse before our eyes. Do you understand? At one point, even 3D TVs were all the rage. They were trying to bring it home.
Now, with TVs, adaptation to real-world conditions is even worse due to the distance to the screen. I was too poor to ever own or even see what a 3D TV looked like, but that's what the research shows. Now, in VR lenses, you get the opposite. Because in my flight simulator, Mount Everest is miles away on the horizon, but my eyes are focused on these two screens on my face. So is there any hope of ever solving this problem, or are we just stuck? In fact, there are a number of technologies that attempt to solve this problem, all with advantages and disadvantages, but it is by no means a lost cause. So, the most promising example concerns variable- focus (VAR) focal displays- headsets that track your eyes.
They determine what you're focusing on and can shift the lens according to depth theoretically in real time. This way, your eyes are always focused at the correct distance as the screen moves towards them. Meta spent years building a prototype that could do this, but they failed to bring it to market. There's Vargu, a virtual reality company that makes military training headsets. They applied similar approaches on the hardware side. And there 's a second approach called light field displays, where instead of projecting a flat image onto your face on a screen, the display essentially reconstructs how light would actually move in space
if the object were physically there. So theoretically your eyes could naturally focus at any depth, because the light behaves like real light. Um, there's a company called Cereal, not Serial, uh, that's making this for AR glasses, but right now, you know, optics, it's just too expensive and too bulky to deliver anything resembling a consumer scale. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there are companies willing to spend billions of dollars to try to solve this problem. I mean, they're trying to find a way around this problem to make it compatible with our bodies. And since VR headsets are really only for nerds right now, we have to The problem is when this stuff, whether we like it or not, gets on the windshield, on the dashboard
of your car. But before I get to cars, let me talk about another body limitation that you've probably experienced yourself, even if you're not a nerd. These are Noise-canceling headphones can worsen hearing disorders. Pressure. Noise-canceling headphones hurt my ears. We've all been through this, haven't we? It's kind of like a heavy head when we put on a pair of AirPods or some Sony noise-canceling phones before we start playing something. You may have seen advertisements for active noise cancellation, how it listens to the world around you and somehow muffles that noise. But let's take the example of an airplane engine. It's annoying, but also reassuring to a certain extent, you know,
but look. This is what the sound wave of an airplane engine looks like if you are outside the plane. chaotic everything looks with all those spikes. However, if you're sitting inside the plane, the wave will look like this. What happens here is that high-frequency noises, like the ones you see here with the spikes, can't travel very far. Therefore, they are stopped by the walls or, in this case, the fuselage plate. Bass noise, lower noises have this wider wave, and so they travel further, and that's why you can hear distant people when you're trying to fall asleep. When a wave rises, it is called a peak.
This means that the sound wave pushes air against your ear. It's like putting pressure on your eardrum. On the other hand, when there is a hollow, it means that the wave is pulling air out of your ear. What active noise cancellation does is actually quite impressive. There is a microphone on the outside of the headphones. The microphone listens to this sound and instantly creates a return wave. Notice what I can do here in some audio software. I can take the original flat wave. I just made a duplicate of it. So theoretically it's the same wave. And I'll take the second wave and invert these curves.
Amplification, stereo, inverting. Now the real wave and the anti-wave from your headphones will meet synchronously. So you have one wave where the peaks are peaks and then one wave where it is inverted. And if you play them both together, you will end up with complete silence. Now the true wave and the counterwave from your headphones will meet synchronously and remove the noise. But there is one big exception to this system. Noise cancellation really works on crying babies, because the wave of a crying baby looks like this. Airplane crying baby. See how chaotic this wave of crying baby is? Your headphones may also try to invert this curve. But this wave is so fast, so chaotic,
that if you turn off your headphones for just a millisecond, you won't get silence. You will actually get a louder noise. So, just like the fuselage muffles the high-pitched sounds of an airplane, your headphones with the little rubber thingy or metal in the ear cups muffle those high-pitched noises, which is certainly not a perfect system. So you're certainly making the room quieter, but in the process you're creating an acoustic environment that's unlike anything else on planet Earth. There is no bass. There is no mid-frequency noise, but there is some high-frequency noise. In the natural world, the low-frequency hum of the environment never goes away. Your brain has never encountered an environment where the bass disappears but the highs remain. So we
evolved to only hear sudden silence during large altitude changes. So when you hear this false silence, your brain panics. He thinks the air pressure suddenly dropped, which creates this phantom feeling of pressure in his head, just to try to explain it. So let's see what we have at the moment. Conflict number one, my OLED displays. They tire my eyes even before takeoff. Uh, conflict two, Mount Everest is 200 miles away on the horizon, but my eyes are focused on the screen right here, 2 inches from my face. Like conflict three, my noise-canceling headphones, they trick my brain into thinking the air pressure has dropped, which is actually realism for my flight simulation. But the fourth conflict, which I have n't even mentioned yet, is the inner ear.
For the last 300,000 years of human evolution, our senses have worked in this perfect alignment with zero latency. So, if your eyes see you running, the fluid in your inner ear senses acceleration. The muscles in your legs feel weight and gravity, everything is alive. Now VR headsets ask you to separate these two things, and also add a bunch of other complications like millisecond delays between controls, video, and audio. And some people just can't. That's what everyone said. Ender Dragon. The brain actually thinks from all these mixed signals that it has been poisoned, and this causes vomiting.
I'm now gradually building my tolerance for PSVR, partly thanks to the Vision Pro, which also has some of these issues, but to a lesser extent. Partly because with Vision Pro, what you see on the screen more closely matches what your muscles and your inner ear feel in the real world. Many people never develop that kind of tolerance. And yet somehow we are expected to start driving these car companies that are obsessed with installing HR displays on windshields. Now every major automaker Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai is competing in a race to turn their windshield into an AR display like this. These cars use a projector hidden inside the dashboard that reflects light off the windshield, right? But because of the angle of the windshield, it doesn't look like a
flat screen. The illusion creates the impression that the graphics are floating in 3D space, that is, on the road. Marketing claims it's safer because you never have to take your eyes off the road. But academic research in cognitive ergonomics has proven that AR windshields are, in essence, a cocktail of biological disasters. So you have pristine accommodation due to the depth of the road compared to the projections on the screen. Your brain is overloaded with a new layer of signals that can actually slow down your reactions. Keeping your eyes on the road is not the same as paying attention to the road. Now, the higher class implementation of this technology is trying to solve
this problem. Some automakers are redesigning the display to place information at different focal lengths, making it feel like there's a part of the world outside the windshield. But below at this point they will still be on a flat plane. And they will be imposed on a generation of drivers who have not been trained in augmented reality, like the bores among us. Last week I finally made it to the Everest summit on the simulator without vomiting. Uh, it's 3 months of building some tolerance, and I believe in that. I think technology will catch up. But big tech companies also need to understand that the reason people suffer from nausea and headaches isn't because of a bad body. The thing is, the technologies they create and sell are fooling the
very nature of our brains, and these technologies are not where they need to be yet. I think it will, but I'm curious what you guys think. Now leave it in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, check out our episode about why movies look cheap on our new TVs. See you
