Slashdot Mirror
3D Displays May Be Hazardous To Young Children
SchlimpyChicken writes "Turns out 3D television can be inherently dangerous to developing children, and perhaps to adults as well. There's a malaise in children that can prevent full stereopsis (depth perception) from developing, called strabismus or lazy-eye. It is an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes do not focus on the same object — kind of like when you watch a 3D movie. As a result, depth perception is compromised. Acting on a hunch, the guys over at Audioholics contacted Mark Pesce, who worked with Sega on its VR Headset over 15 years ago — you know, the headset that never made it to market. As it turns out, back then Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports, and the project. Unfortunately, the same dangers exist in today's 3D, and the electronics, movie, and gaming industries seem to be ignoring the issue. If fully realized, 3D just might affect the vision of millions of children and, according to the latest research, many adults, across the country." The Audioholics article is a good candidate for perusing with Readability — the pseudo-link popups are blinding.
WTF is wrong with them!? Why did they bury the findings!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
M for Mature is a rating for content like films and games, not for the mode of delivery of content.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Not too much to ask for a journal article from a reputable journal or an article from well know science print.
Ten years prior to that, Sega actually did release a 3D headset for the Master System.
Whenever a new technology pops up, there come the people that warn about the dangers coming from it and how the world as we know it will end. This was the same with books, trains, cars, radio television, internet, cell phones.... i am sure there are plenty more... As long as you or your child doesn't consume 3d television 24/7 i am sure you'll be fine.
"Daddy, it's my turn! Let me play my 3DS!"
"Son, for the hundredth time, it will be your turn once your stereopsis is fully developed!"
"Mommmmmy!"
Better known as 318230.
Auto-stereoscopic displays don't require glasses and wouldn't cause this sort of issue if I'm understanding the vision problems correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
In this interview the president of Nintendo discusses the fact that the 3D affect can be dangerous to developing children. Considering the fact that Nintendo began placing health and safety warnings at the beginning of all of their games in 2004 and has included such a message on the startup screens of both the DS and Wii, we can assume that they will make an effort to warn parents and children of the dangers any time the product is turned on.
I went to a talk last week given by BBC R&D with the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Royal Television Society. The problem with children was raised, however research that is currently being conducted and is finding that children adapt better than adults. We will have to wait until they are finished and peer reviewed however.
What is more worrying is driving a car after watching 3D TV. You eyes focus on a 40 inch screen 3-4m away, however you brain thinks you are looking in the distance because the image is converging at a different point (not 3m away). This isn't really a problem in the cinema as the distance to the screen is far greater, as at 50 feet your eyes are focused at almost infinity. Stepping out of the living room and in to a car can easily have an effect on judgement of distance, and give you headaches.
Headaches, incidentally, is a problem with all consumer home 3D TVs. They will give the vast majority of people a headache after 10 minutes. That's a fact!
Virtual Boy hardware was rated 7+ in its manual.
Besides, this is a display panel, not goggles. Setting stereo separation to 0 would make it little different from a DSi with a better video chip.
I used to have fairly poor vision, but equally in both eyes (-4.25 in both). As I've gotten older, my vision has improved, but more in the right eye than the left (-2.25 left, -0.50 right). I often read at night and never use my glasses. With my vision being somewhat different between the eyes I started getting lazy and only reading with my right eye. Eventually I stopped using binocular vision at all.
Then a few months ago I started to get interesting in stereoscopic photography using the "crossed eyes" method. After about a week of looking at pictures like this, suddenly I was using my binocular vision while reading again. And overall my depth perception improved. I suspect it has something to do with having better focus control of my eyes. So I'm not sure that I buy this "3D is bad for your vision" thing. Actual studies showing the effects would be interesting, but this seems to be just speculation.
But will it keep them off my lawn . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
So Nintendo rolls out the best thing in handheld games since the first Gameboy, and suddenly 3D is bad for children. What a coincidence. I suspect that this is just an underhanded PR attack against Nintendo by one of its rivals.
Now when I watch 3D porn I really will go blind
So wait, does this mean Magic Eye pictures (remember those?) can make you go blind too?
And while we're at it, is it really such a great idea that almost all the kids movies these days are pushed in 3D?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
The ayes react to the proximity of an object in two ways
The first in convergence : both eyes make a slight angle in theay a telemeter would do. this is bound to the distance or at least the PERCEIVED distance when each eye has a different image.
The second is focus : if the object is 50cm away, the focus of each eye is set to 50cm.
In normal vision, these two actions are synchronzed, and many years of living with it has helped us to do so.
Unfortunately, in 3D vision, convergence asks something while focus asks for something else (you see the object at 50cm, but each eye should focus on the screen nevertheless), which is the reason why this false 3D is far from perfect and can be just as painful as eye convergence reeducation. In fact, it is ye convergence DISeducation.
All those Viewmaster slides!
I believe most 3D will "make your eyes hurt" for extended use until they solve vergence and accomodation issues. While there is some work (e.g., accommodation display at Fraunhofer and some work at HITlab) to resolve these, I'm afraid we might not see the results of these at Best Buy anytime soon.
Having demonstrated 3D technology to hundreds of adults and kids, my experience has been that kids below 12 _generally_ don't seem to "get" 3D. Perhaps it's their visual system, or perhaps it's because the inter-pupillary-distance (IPD) is wrong on most systems for how far apart their eyes are. I don't this they'll be missing out on too much if they skip out on the 3D games until their visual systems catch up with the tech.
All this aside, I'm personally thrilled that all this 3D technology is becoming mainstream, but I wouldn't (and wouldn't recommend for anyone to) use the 3D technology for more than a couple of hours a day at most. Still, the fear-mongering articles and the 3-D bashing that accompanies them (probably by people who can't see the 3D effect) kind of ticks me off..
The problem is exactly that your eyes don't focus at different depths with virtual 3D.
When you watch a 3D movie, your eyes are focusing just fine, they are focusing on the screen.
The human visual system conditions that are present in the movie theater are different that real life, since when you are focusing on the screen your eyes are verging in on objects that are not located in what is called the Zero Paralax Position, (ZPS) which is essentially the screen plane.
There is a zone of confort where the decoupling of vergence and focus is ok and there will not be any side effects.
This is achieved by not having too much stuff in negative paralax (in front of) or positive paralax (outside of) the screen.
Kid's human visual system is very adept. Filmakers are careful especially with kids movies to not have a lot of separation in the 3D especially since children's eyes are not as far apart as adults.
Finally most of these studies are old Japanese studies that were performed on old hardware and the results aren't really viable.
I've successfully decoupled my vergence and focus and you can too.
Also if you want to hear more about strabismus and 3-D look up "Stereo Sue" who actually had surgery to regain her strabismus and now is an avid 3-D fan.
This sounds like FUD to me
Before we post we just need to figure out what eye to look at.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I mean.. so what?.. Let's just prepare for the case where we spend most of our time immersed in 3D CG environments. Optimize for that case and develop special goggles/implants to correct the strabismus for the rare occasion when we disconnect and want to take a peek at the naked 'real' world. Who *doesn't* want their view of the real world overlayed with location-aware ads and their gaggle of facebook/skype/tweet messages anyway?
I'm interested in strabismus because my father and my sister had it. I've been tested for it myself by optometrists with fancy equipment that required me to orient my eyes in different directions, sort of what TFA describes.
I read that whole article and the links and I couldn't find a single thing to support their claim that 3D video causes strabismus.
It looks like the whole article is based on Mark Pesce telling Wayde Robson that he doesn't have time to be interviewed for 2 weeks.
The journalism that Robson practices is a bit too familiar and colloquial for my tastes. It's one thing to read an article that sounds like a guy giving you the straight dope after a few drinks in a bar. It's another thing to read an article that sounds like a "journalist" who doesn't know what "fact checking" means.
He quotes SRI as saying, “You Cannot Give This To Kids!” but that's fiction. SRI would never use words like that in a scientific report. I don't suppose it occurred to Robson to call SRI and find out if they actually did a report like that. Or to call an optometrist or ophthalmologist.
"Children under seven are at risk of strabismus – period." Another fiction.
Let's go back to basic scientific method. If you actually found children under seven who didn't have strabismus, then used 3D video, and developed strabismus, you could raise the reasonable hypothesis that 3D video caused strabismus. I've never heard of strabismus being acquired like that, but I'm open to new evidence.
Nothing in TFA indicates that anybody found a single child under seven who had strabismus from 3D video. So there's no justification for making that statement. It's all speculation.
When I was a kid, I spent hours looking into a View Master, studying the details in those tiny little slides.
I also had toys made entirely out of lead. Mercury was cool. And I played with real electricity, complete with real shocks. And, once or twice, I nearly set my bedroom on fire.
I'm still here. And I'm even healthy.
Here's a big *shrug* to everything related to this story.
Kid-proof tablet..
Actually, the lens has to focus on the distance of the physical screen, or you don't get a sharp image. The relative orientation of the eyes, however, will correspond to the apparent position of the 3D object shown.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, that alone would not be a problem, because in both cases we only get the light which hits our eyes. If the light from the real object and from the movie object were exactly the same, than for our eyes it would be as if the object were where it appears to be, and everything is OK. However, in reality, it isn't like that. Each single eye image already contains a depth information due to the divergence of light rays (the ray approximation is still good here). This depth information matters because it determines how the lens in your eye has to be focused to get a sharp image. For 3D movies, this "focal depth" still is the distance of the screen.
On the other hand, the binocular vision allows to extract depth information from the displacements between the left-eye and the right-eye image. This is what our 3D perception comes from, and this is what the 3D movies use. So the "binocular depth" is wherever the object appears to be in the 3D movie.
Now in the real world, "focal depth" and "binocular depth" are the same. Therefore they are normally coupled in your vision system (focusing at an object at different distance means both moving the eyes so that the displacement is zero for the desired distance, and changing the eyes' lenses so that images from that distance are sharp). This link breaks for 3D movies (you still have to move your eyes, but you don't have to re-focus the lens).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm very surprised to see this article on the front page of slashdot. About 7-8 months ago, I was in the market for a new television: a panasonic plasma. Since I knew they were coming out with new 3d tv's, I decided to do some research on them. Suddenly, I started to think about all the times when I had gone to the movies and watched them on 3d, only to come out disappointed because of the headache I had acquired. I poured through hours worth of webpages and learned how we are able to see the 3d effects created in the theaters. Its kind of ridiculous to think that I have not seen any widespread front page news coverage on how your eyes are forced to move unnaturally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_dysphoria It has to do with how our eyes see things. 3d makes our eyes do unnatural things. I think its safe to say that children's bodies are constantly developing, and they are more susceptible to damage than adults are. If you really want to read about how these things work, I found a great link. http://www.journalofvision.org/content/8/3/33.full I like my children, so personally I'd rather be safe than sorry.
Mark has been talking about "binocular dysphoria" for some time now (e.g. Wired article from 1994). Thing is, it seems nobody else is.
The effect certainly exists (I've experienced it myself, though only for a matter of seconds), but it remains doubtful as to how significant it is. There are various medical studies that confirm the resiliency of human vision to this type of effect, but it seems no studies have been found or cited that show any lasting problems (with the possible exception of this informal commercial Sega report that Mark was involved in, if it's ever verified).
My take is, if you're a cautious type, there's no need to rush your kids into these things - it's just one form of entertainment, after all. Further study certainly wouldn't hurt. OTOH, artificial stereopsis has been around for literally hundreds of years (some French painter invented the parallax barrier method in 1692) with no reported long-term effects since then. Anecdotally, others here have mentioned viewing stereo material day in, day out for years with no ill effects either, so if there are any ill effects they're probably subtle.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?