Do Blue Light Filters Reduce Visual Fatigue When Using Digital Maps? An Eye Tracking Experiment to Promote Vision Health

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present an eye tracking experiment to evaluate how blue light filtering of digital maps reduces visual fatigue and thus promotes vision care in public health. Prolonged exposure to light from digital screen reading results in visual fatigue, and visible light in the blue range exacerbates visual fatigue because it requires the highest energy output to display onscreen. System‐level blue light filtering increasingly is used as a “nighttime” mode for short screen sessions at night and is purported to combat visual fatigue for longer screen sessions throughout the day. Blue light filtering is particularly relevant to cartography, as blue is among the most common colors used on maps for both denotative and aesthetic purposes. To this end, we conducted a one‐factor eye tracking experiment with 78 participants to evaluate the effects of three blue light filtering conditions. The experiment used the recently released “teal‐based” style of Google Maps as the visual input for blue light filtering, a digital web map that is publicly available and has a broad user base. We collected eye tracking measures correlated with visual fatigue related to map reading such as blinking frequency and pupil diameter, with a mixture of Likert‐based self‐reported measures. We demonstrate empirically that low levels of blue light filtering can alleviate visual fatigue without compromising the denotive and aesthetic quality of digital maps, although high levels of blue light filtering impedes performance and aesthetics. Our results indicate that low blue light filtering delays visual fatigue by 3–4 min and high blue light filtering by 6–7 min. Our findings also provide preliminary evidence that reading digital maps for a short period of time does not lead to visual fatigue; however, visual fatigue may appear after reading digital maps for 18 min, offering new evidence for the design of digital maps that consider eye care and visual health.