In many homes, having the TV on almost all the time someone's in the house is quite normal, as if we now expect the background noise of a TV set. For me, even though my Mac Mini is connected to the TV, I use the TV set maybe only once or twice per month. Normality for me is being glued to a computer screen, and over time, while those screens became of much higher quality, they're still not those TV sets.
What is worrying is how much the new TV sets, even when idle while nobody's watching but still on, still take roughly twice the amount the electricity of old TVs. That's not because they are less power efficient, because they are at least 50% more efficient for the same surface, but because our TV sets are so much bigger now to make the power efficiency difference insignificant. Compare this to a 4th-gen iPad with its 10-hour battery life, and the power waste of TVs become worrisome.
I guess those are the (few) benefits of bringing screens closer to our eyes. We haven't seen VR headsets make a comeback, but with stuff like Google Glasses I wouldn't be surprised.
Published on November 18, 2012 at 20:03 EST
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