What are night driving glasses?
Night driving glasses are usually non-prescription glasses with yellow lenses and can be bought in many optical stores or online. Lenses range in color from light yellow to amber, and some night driving glasses have an anti-reflective coating. The yellow night driving glasses have been manufactured and sold for decades. They were originally sold to hunters as shooting glasses because they gave birds a sharper contrast to the sky on overcast or overcast days.
Do night driving glasses really work?
Yellow lenses reduce the amount of light entering your eye, reducing visibility. These darker colors block more blue light than yellow lenses. But they block more light from entering the eye, reducing visibility even more in low-light conditions. In fact, even yellow lenses reduce overall visible light to some extent because they block some blue light. This can be a good thing during the day, but not at night, when maximum visibility is key. Night driving glasses come in a variety of yellow and amber colors. The darkest lenses filter out the harshest light, but they filter out the largest amount of light, making it difficult to see in dim or dark conditions. Some people who wear night driving glasses say they can see better with them on. However, vision tests have shown that night driving glasses do not improve night vision, nor do they help drivers see pedestrians any faster than they would without glasses.
Study On the Night Driving Glasses
Researchers at Harvard's Schepens Eye Research Institute recently conducted a study to find out if wearing night driving glasses while driving at night is good for vision. All 22 participants "drove" under four conditions that simulated night driving, wearing either yellow night driving glasses or glasses with clear lenses. Each participant drove with or without the headlight glare simulator activated to simulate the effect of oncoming traffic. The study found that wearing glasses while driving at night didn't seem to improve: how well the participants were able to recognize pedestrians at night and negative effects of headlight glare on pedestrian detection. "Our data suggest that wearing yellow lenses while driving at night does not improve performance at the most critical task: pedestrian detection," the study's authors said. A small 2019 study showed that night driving glasses can actually slow down visual reflection by a fraction of a second, making night vision worse.
