Interesting view! Thanks for posting.

I would not single out OLED to try to blame it for causing sore heads though.

All forms of LED, screens and otherwise, flicker, not just OLED. The reason for this is that each LED comprising a screen or otherwise is driven by pulses of current, with a very short on-time, and a relatively long pause of darkness in between. The LED needs the off-time to cool down between pulses.

The human eye perceives the rapidly pulsing LED as constantly on, at the full brightness that exists during each pulse.

So part of the secret of making very bright LEDs, is to drive them very cleverly in pulses that literally trick the eye.

An extreme case of exposure to OLEDs is VR by way of the popular Oculus Rift CV1 headset (Me included). Our entire field of view comprises an OLED screen, where our eyes are focused on this via large optical lenses, and all other light excluded.

Some days we might spend six hours or more thus exposed.

There appear no particular reports of sore heads amongst us happy users.

Actually, I personally would report the opposite. I have more than once began an Oculus session with a sore head, and realised that by the end of it, the sore head has gone.

Further, I notice I might start a VR session with mild myopia, and end with perfect distant vision.

I know this is from necessarily spending much of the rest of my time, like everyone else in the modern age, reading from conventional screens spaced less than one metre away, including phone and tablet, so my eyes spend most of their time strained, unless I sometimes wear reading glasses to relieve.

Again I note this can relieve a sore head, as well as restoring distance vision.

The lenses in a VR headset such as Oculus serve a similar purpose to reading glasses, tricking our eyes into focussing at a distance, when the screen is actually sitting literally on the bridge of our nose.

So I would say the source of the sore head, in most cases of folks using screens, is far more likely to be simple eye strain, from persistently focusing on something less than a metre away, when our eyes historically were built to focus mostly at a distance.

Sore head sufferers should try using reading glasses when using screens, to see if that makes any difference.

I think singling out OLEDs is more likely a case of “Mistaking the trees for the woods”