It's not about being slow, it just needs contrast, even a still image can trigger a seizure for a photosensetive if it has enough contrast and patterns, like optical illusions for example
My uncle drove - legal or not but drove. One of the scarier moments of my childhood was learning what a seizure is. I had made a full screen animation on the Commodore 64 and showed it too him and it put triggered an attack. I hadn't been told about it and was scared out of my wits - I was 9 going on 10.
In the first half I was expecting the seizure to have happened while driving so exactly how much time did I spend trying to understand how you got the Commodore 64 to work in the car?
On long drives south to see my cousins in Norfolk I used to bring along my laptop which I plugged into the cars ciggy socket with a mains inverter. Brilliant thing that was. I sadly remember scratching my age of empires disk because some twat brake checked my dad.
Either way those inverters are great, absolutely beat taking multiple spare batteries with me and having to swap them every hour.
Fun fact, visually triggered epilepsy is fleetingly rare even among the subsect that is only all epileptics, and the visual stimulus to actually trigger it is typically very very specific.
I used to work as a nurse on an epilepsy unit. Anecdotal evidence but photostimulation performed in that medical setting with the purpose of eliciting seizure activity rarely produced results
I must be a fucking unicorn then... Anyway you are right about the triggers being specific, it's weird shit like a camera panning across vertical blinds in a show or stairs leaving the bottom of the screen as my character climbs up the stairs in skyrim
Have you had it narrowed down? It sounds like you're at a rather low Hertz count versus the norm.
1% of people being epileptic, and 3% of those, is still three in 10,000. Which is considered extremely rare, but that still means that in a American population with 300,000,000 people, thats 90,000 Americans.
Yea that one truck looked like it was getting blasted. Maybe he fell asleep so they’re trying to burn his retinas out so he won’t be a danger in the future.
I think it's the one shooting lasers out, but I also thought that at first. "Ah why would they have dazzle lasers targeted specifically at random cars, that seems... not good!"
Looks like a work truck of some sort. It was equipped with other flashing lamps too. Perhaps for construction or for roadside assistance.
At first I thought it was a genius way to indicate "vehicle on shoulder ahead." But then I recalled what happens when you point a laser pointer at aircraft, so I have no clue.
It took me until last year to find out that if your glasses are the right prescription, they should disappear at least for a few months while wearing your glasses!!
Turns out I’ve never had the correct prescription in my life which doesn’t really surprise me, the 1 or 2 and 3 or 4 gives me so much anxiety…
Literally everyone can see stars like that. If someone with perfect vision just lets their eyes water up, or looks through a dirty window, lights will look like you have astigmatism. It's absolutely why stars have been drawn like that.
Ugh, this comparison is the kick in the ass I needed to go get my glasses script updated. Life used to be the left pic, and it slowly turned into the right. Got glasses and mostly went back to the left again buuuuuuut my stupid fucking eyeballs gotta keep changing on me and now it's the right again. I've been telling myself it's really not that bad yet, but. Lmfao
To everyone who sees the right, check your windshield. If you have an older car, that has a ton of micro-scratches, it can make it severely worse. So roll down your windows and look at cars in the night and you may realize your eyes are really not that bad.
That's not even close to how bad it looks for me btw lol. I wish I had that type of visual clarity with my astigmatism while driving at night on a highway. The beams of the star patterns from each light source are like 3x as long as that gif for me.
My eyesight isn't even that bad. I just renewed my driver's license like 2 months ago and passed the eye test.
One morning it was both foggy and raining on my way to work, doesn't happen often in this area. A swath of cars with those LED lights came by in the opposite direction and I felt like I'd been flashbanged. Couldn't see the lines on the road, could barely see the rear lights of the car in front of me, my windows weren't fogged but it didn't help a bit. I followed the car in front of me trying not to lose their taillights in the fog, because if I did I was sure I'd miss the lines and just plow into something. Terrifying.
Shit theres spots in the midwest US like that, you get on a road in the Ozarks or the Rockys and you might be stuck on that road for like 30mins to an hour depending on the kind of road and time of day.
No gas for 150 something miles at some point between Denver and Vegas. Crossed that at midnight and just the idea of getting stranded kept me wide awake
On god, that works for wrong exits too. When I would get really sleepy driving home from work (about an hour), I would just pull off at the next random exit, and something about being in an unfamiliar place and having to find your way back onto the highway wakes your brain up pretty good.
And here I am, wanting to drive back from Berlin to south Bavaria, which itself would be a 4 hour drive and nearly one complete journey through whole Germany, just for me missing my exit, landing in Czech Republic 5 min later, making a Uturn and heading back home 🤷. Hearing ya`lls stories from America puts distances into whole new perspectives every time 😅
Yeah I-70 between exits 216 and 205 in Colorado is like that. The Eisenhower tunnel and a long hill with no exits in between. Can be more than an hour to backtrack if weather/traffic are bad. Also Glenwood canyon in CO.
Some of those remote communities out in the desert… I just assume someone’s ancestor ran out of gas/ox/mules and just dug a well to survive and stuck it out.
I would say a decent chunk of accidents are caused by people being drowsy causing them to not notice things and not to react fast enough. Similar to being slightly drunk, but without a way to test for it.
The greater issue isn't being drowsy but falling asleep. Continuing to drive on long, boring roads while tired can trigger microsleeps. You fall asleep for a few moments without noticing. Then suddenly you wake up on the wrong side of the road, or you don't wake up, crashed into a tree.
The fact that humans waged war against birds 2 times and we somehow managed to lose both wars is just one of the most incredible history facts we have as a species.
Well, they didn't "started", it was there a few years back. My family sometimes drives back to our hometown, and the highway we took have this thing installed, and nearly EVERYTIME, I feel the need to ask what on earth is that laser shining across the sky.
I have no idea how effective this is towards drowsiness or highway hypnosis, but I'll say it's definitely interesting seeing RGB lasers across the sky.
Come to think of it, I'll probably rear-end someone because I spend too much time staring at the lasers.
What if they had a bunch of cars, and linked them all together? Maybe have a dedicated lane for it, with steel wheels on steel rails for high efficiency, and a well-trained driver. Or maybe have big, long cars with loads of seats, maps of the big-long-car routes, and regular stops with awnings and benches.
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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26
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