Too much screen time isn’t just draining, it’s potentially dangerous.
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In fact, recent research has warned that more than a couple hours of screen time for children and teens can accelerate blindness and increase chances of age-related macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease that leads to significant vision loss after age 50.
Sick of being unable to escape his laptop, phone and TV screens, entrepreneur and engineer Scott Blew sought to create something to help.
After reading a Wired story about a new type of film that blocked light emitted from screens, Blew pitched a cheap sunglasses product to Steelcase, the company behind the film, and tested them out.
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"Amazingly, it worked," Wired reported. "Blew could look through the lenses and see everything—except for screens, which turned black."
He took the prototype to artist Ivan Cash to come up with a real product, appropriately dubbed IRL Glasses. “IRL” is an abbreviation for the phrase “in real life.”
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“I discovered that when you actually flatten and rotate a regular polarized lens, you can block out LCD and LED screens and those make up most of the displays,” Blew said in the Kickstarter promotional video.
The product launched on Kickstarter this week and allows users to ignore wavelengths of light from LED and LCD screens. Blew, Cash and their team raised more than $76,000 within three days, quickly surpassing the funding goal of $25,000.
Learn more about the Kickstarter campaign at kickstarter.com.