>>12523494>Would I be able to achieve the same effect if I looked at a mirror 10 feet away from me which depicted the wall behind me? What if I had a mirror right in front of me that depicted a surface 20 feet behind me or a series of mirrors?Yes, this would work fine.
>Is the eye strain based on the distance of the mirror from me or the perceived distance of the surface portrayed in the mirror?The latter.
>>12523555>would looking at a distant landscape on the monitor also work?No.
The thing that makes staring-at-far-away-object work is that you are focusing your eyes on a point far away. It's not looking at something that makes the difference, it's focusing your eyes in a way that is optimized for sharply seeing something that's 20 feet away.
Seeing the item in the mirror has the same effect, because you can see any part of the distant object on any part of the mirror depending on where you place your eyes. This means that if you focus your eyes differently, what you see in the mirror adapts to your eye configuration.
On a screen, on the other hand, each pixel of the object can only be seen in a single place -- the pixel where the screen depicts it. If you focus your eyes on a point 20 feet behind the screen, you just see a blurry screen, not a sharp view of something far away. If you focus on a long-distance picture on your screen, you are really focusing your eyes on the distance to your screen, not the implied distance of the object, because that's the focus point where you can see the object sharply. The implied distance on the picture does not change this.
