High-contrast baby sensory
Newborn sight works nothing like ours. So every video starts from what a baby's eyes can actually pick up — the contrast, the size of a pattern, the pace of it — and we publish all the numbers behind it.
At birth the biggest, boldest shapes come through most clearly. Finer detail arrives over the following weeks.
Where this started
It turns out to be a phrase that covers a lot of ground.
A soft grey pattern and a true black-and-white one can both be described the same way, and to a six-week-old they are quite different things. Working out where the line sits is what sent us down this road in the first place. Since we had to measure it anyway, we may as well publish what we found — the values live in the code, so every video is made the same way.
The one on the left is what a young baby picks out most easily.
The method
The full table, split by age, lives in the specification — along with the research each figure comes from.
See every value →Measured at 18.96:1, against 21:1 for absolute black on white. We stop deliberately short of pure values: absolute black gives the encoder no headroom and hard edges ring after compression.
Our repeating patterns run 0.08–0.35 cycles per degree, which sits inside the band where infant contrast sensitivity peaks. It shifts with your screen and where your baby is sitting, so we have worked it out for a few real setups.
Capped at 8–11°/s for 0–3 months, rising to about 13°/s by 6–12 months. For the youngest babies most of the video simply rests, and when something does move it moves slowly enough to follow.
The highest reading across the whole catalogue is 0.56 qualifying transitions per second, against the general-population threshold of three in WCAG 2.3.1. No infant-specific standard exists, so we use the closest published one and keep a wide margin.
Every video is built on a musical bar grid at 48–116 BPM by age, so scene changes land on a downbeat. A newborn scene runs 20–90 seconds. Babies settle into a pattern and gradually lose interest, and that whole arc is the part worth having, so scenes are given room to breathe.
Guides
Short, sourced answers to the questions that come up most.
Five checks you can make in thirty seconds — contrast, shape size, motion speed, flashing and scene length — with the measured values behind each.
What the three-flashes-per-second standard actually means, who is at risk, and the measured flash rates across our own catalogue.
We make the videos and still think cards are the better default under six months. The honest comparison, plus how to make your own.
Good to know
Short answers. The long version lives in the specification.
A newborn's contrast sensitivity is very low compared with an adult's, so soft or pastel patterns register as roughly uniform grey. Black against white is the largest luminance difference available, which is why it holds attention when gentler colours do not.
Clearest vision at birth is at roughly 20 to 30 centimetres — about the distance from a feeding baby's eyes to the face of whoever is holding them. Detail beyond that falls away quickly in the first weeks.
Colour vision emerges gradually over the first months rather than switching on at a fixed date. Red is generally distinguished before green and blue, and by around five to six months colour discrimination is much closer to an adult's.
Let the baby end it rather than the clock. Turning away, glazing over, fussing or arching are all signals they have had enough, and at this age a few minutes of engaged looking is a complete session.
There is no single right answer, so we publish the maths instead of a rule. A phone at 40 cm, a tablet at 50 cm and a TV at 2.5 m all land within a fairly narrow band — roughly 74 to 97 pixels per degree of your baby's visual field — so the patterns work across all three. The full table is on the methodology page.
For most families under six months, cards are the lovely option. No screen, you can hold them at exactly the right distance, and your baby decides how long to look. Video earns its place on the days when your hands are full.
Paediatric guidance generally discourages screen media below around 18 to 24 months, apart from video calls. We think that is sound, and we would rather say so. What we can offer is a clear account of what is on the screen, for the moments when a family does reach for one.
Detail resolution improves, tracking becomes smoother, and colour starts to come in. That is where our tier 2 videos begin: a single red is introduced, and nothing else. Yellow and blue are held back until the 6–12 month tier, and motion speeds rise from roughly 8°/s to 13°/s across the three bands.