GooeyGus said:
I've noticed that blu-ray causes my floaters to become much more noticeable as well. weird.
Not the least bit weird, really. Hell, some of them may even contain fluorescent proteins. But more to the point, it's pretty intense light, in a part of the spectrum where there is very little ambient light. As a consequence, they end up casting more noticeable and distinct shadows on your retina. Also, when you're doing stuff, you're more apt to move your head and eyes about, which causes the floaters to move about in your field of vision, due to inertia and moving in a fluid medium. Finally, there is a small body of evidence to suggest that short wavelength light can increase the number of floaters formed in the macular field of vision.
As daguin said, everyone has some, but most people's brains will start to filter them out. Some are congenital. Some originate with trauma. Most originate with aging of the eyeball, wherein the fluid medium slowly transitions from one viscosity to another, causing strain on thin fibres attached to the retina, such that these fibers eventually snap. Some of those end up tangled into balls, others remain mostly straight. Solid black ones are blood cells that have leaked into the viscous fluid and have not yet settled to the interior surface (where any free-floating ones of a certain size and composition will be reabsorbed into the bloodstream and eaten by macrophages).
They are normally no cause for concern, unless they cause distress. However, if you have many of them, or a large number of them appear at the same time, or if they appear while accompanied by white flashes, then you should see an eye doc about it. If the white flashes occur, you should see an eye doc in the next 72 hours, on the off chance that it indicates retinal detachment (rare, and the flashes are not a strong indicator, but catching it early is important for a good prognosis, so checking it out quickly is always worth it).
If they cause distress, you're in the same boat as me. I get dizzy from them, sometimes, and my brain does not filter them out at all. That is what got me interested in lasers in the first place, as I have done medical research in the past, and fully intend to develop a safer, more effective procedure for floater removal. I've run the initial concept by docs, and it has been deemed viable, so I hope to realize a prototype.
Current treatments either involve draining all of the fluid from the eye, or disintegrating them with pulsed lasers. Both of these approaches have a significant risk of accidental damage to the eye, as well as later complications of the treatment. Most relevantly, perhaps, is the 4% chance of going blind, last time I checked. Those risks were not acceptable to me, but a lot of people are worse off than I am, so a lot of people still elect to have these procedures performed.
Anyway, that's probably all you ever wanted to know about floaters.
and yes... shinning a laser on the Radiometer does make
It's actually quite an interesting effect, especially when looking at reflected light from a green.
