Has anyone considered polarized lenses for goggles

[Lohman446]

Serious question. I happened to throw on my sunglasses going down the road today and the polarization seems to make everything so much easier to see. I could see this being a distinct advantage in paintball. Thoughts?

[egb groupie]

Serious question. I happened to throw on my sunglasses going down the road today and the polarization seems to make everything so much easier to see. I could see this being a distinct advantage in paintball. Thoughts?

I think it would be impractical from a cost perspective for manufacturers, because they would have to sink so much money into polarizing a surface area as big as a paintball mask goggles, as well as making them compliant to ASTM standards. It could be done, but I'm sure the price would be out of reach for the average weekend paintball player.

[Hexis]

Nah, take a polarized sheet and cut it to the shape of the inside of the goggles. The biggest problem I can see is that since the surface are is so large you would get inconsistant polarization results, and could get some strange effects from that. In addition on any polarization there is a pretty big light loss, so it would only work in bright area/games.

[Dryden]

Why not just wear your favorite pair of brand x polarized sunglasses under your mask?

The problem with polarizing a goggle lense is that the lense isn't close enough to your face for the polarization to work effectively, unless the polarizing material was bonded with the original lense plastic while still in liquid form, which, if I'm not mistaken, is a process which Oakley has already patented. The conventional film pressing technique would produce more glare on the surface of the goggles' lense because of the lenses distance from your eyes.

Take a pair of polarized glasses and hold them an inch out from your face. Unless you look perfectly down the center of the lense, most polarized glasses will do worse when you look off into the periphery without the lenses directly in front of your eye, where the curvature is engineered to work at filtering the reflective light.

Try reading an LCD display with polarized sunglasses; you usually get serious color distortion and a blue rainbow on the LCD display. Now apply this to a bunch of people with polarized masks trying to read their LCD on their E-frames. ;)

[REDRT]

You can buy polorized sun glasses at the gas station for $5. I couldn't see goggle lenses being out of reach if they made them. I use tinted lenses for outdoor games all season and even in brightly lit indoor games. I wouldn't think tinting would be problem in many cases. Alot of my buddies swear by polorized lenses for things like fishing. They do cut the glare and reflection. I myself get terrible headaches from wearing polorized glasses for long periods for some reason. But I could see the benifit of using them even at paintball if someone made them for people that like them.

[Hexis]

The big difference between holding polorized lenses a inch from your face and goggles, is that inside goggles it's pretty dark. You are not likely to get reflections on the inside surface of the polarization material. You will run into some inconsistant polarization on a lens as large as paintball goggles since the angle of polarization will be consistant across the film, and not across the surface of the goggle lens. It's akin to using a polarizaion filter on a very wide angle lens on a camera. Nothing too awful, just inconsistant filtering.

[Pacifist_Farmer]

I'm going out on a limb here, cause I don't have any proof, and I'm too lazy to look for it, but..

I think some-one has already made polarized lenses, in addition to all of the tinted lenses (yellow, like in shooting glasses).