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Nintendo Warns 3D Games Can Ruin Children's Eyes
Hugh Pickens writes "Fox News reports that Nintendo has posted a cautionary note on its Japanese website that 'vision of children under the age of six has been said [to be in the] developmental stage,' adding that 3D content 'delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes.' The notice went to say that Nintendo recommends that all viewers take regular breaks while watching 3D video or playing stereoscopic 3D games (google translation). Dr. Michael Ehrenhaus, an ophthalmologist with New York Cornea Consultants, thinks Nintendo and Sony may be getting ahead of themselves with these disclaimers. 'It's hard to say that it'll ruin development,' says Ehrenhaus."
It's just easier to save up all those breaks and have them in one go when you go to bed.
Children can suffer things like "lazy eye" and neither Sony or Nintendo wants to be hit by a lawsuit indicating that their newfangled product was responsible, even if it isn't the case. Thus they preemptively warn about letting developing children use the product.
It's in a similar vein to how radio enthusiasts set up their antennas unpowered at first so that they can tell "radio sensitives" where to show it.
Nintendo pulled the Visual Boy because of this effect. I hate the feeling my eyes get while watching isometric 3d projections. It's unnatural, and I swear viewing all those 3d stills when I was a kid with the goggles didn't help.
And here I thought it was a myth...
Should be:
Seeing as how this is a Nintendo story and if you read TFA the warning was in fact posted on Nintendo's site.
Nintendo gave simlar warnings 15 years ago: Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s Big 3-D Flop, Turns 15
There is nothing inherent in 3D that should be problematic. It is, after all, our normal environment, and 2D is what should be problematic.
This isn't quite correct. In our normal environment, there's a correspondence between the parallax depth of objects (their displacement in the left eye image vs. the right eye image) and their focal depth (the curvature of the cornea required to produce a sharp image on the retina). On any 3D TV/film display, no such correspondence exists.
In a cinema, the distance to the screen is far enough that this generally isn't a big deal: the rays coming from one point on the screen, by the time they hit your pupil, have diverged along such a narrow angle that they might as well be parallel (as if from an infinitely distant source.) But when you're in a living room with a screen in front of you, it's potentially a much bigger deal. We have plenty of reasons to suppose that the brain 'trains' itself on this depth-correspondence, and exposing kids to a lot of visual stimulus which lacks this correspondence could easily throw a wrench into this training process. We just don't know yet.
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This has been covered half a dozen times yet no one in the media gets it: 3D that is being popularized strains the eyes and messes with the brain. I've yet to see a movie that states you shouldn't drive for 2 hours after watching it to let your depth perception recover- because it has been hacked at with the method of presentation.
Everyone LOVES 3D that really pops- and to get that level of pop the eyes must be further and further strained outwards. While this is fine for the short term, immediate needs doing it for any length of time is a huge stressor.
Unfortunately I am at home and don't have any of the papers that were published in the late 80's and 90's about these issues. Sega (damn memory) had a unit that was going to be 3D capable but ended up canning it for a variety of issues- including the health of children. Obviously now adays that isn't a concern and money, as always, comes first.
I know of some military groups that prohibit their members from operating a vehicle for 8 hours after performing 2-4 hours of stereo work. They must be driven home by a buddy. That's not over-reacting in my opinion.
Crewmen of submarines must recover their 3D vision after spending so long cooped up with nothing 'far' available to be seen. They're also banned from operating vehicles while in port for some duration.
Why is it any surprise that a developing brain can be traumatized by seeing something that it wasn't wired to see?
Go ahead- screw your kids up. Mine won't be. I've got hundreds of other ways to mess them up :)
There is nothing inherent in 3D that should be problematic.
I kinda disagree, based on the fact that technical generated 3D is simply a hack for your brain. It is designed to fool your brain into thinking that things that have no depth, have depth. I can see the possibility that it might not be good for developing eyes.
I remember watching a video in school (late 70s) about a guy who created special headset binoculars that he wore all the time for a week. They made everything upside down, which was humorous and made him have to adjust to walking, etc. He wore them every waking hour. Within a week, his brain had adjusted and flipped the image, so now with the headgear, everything was now right side up. Once he quit using them, obviously, everything was back to upside down, and it took a couple of weeks to get back to "right". This experiment is exactly parallel to what we are talking about: hacking the brain to see something differently. The experiment didn't go as far as exploring long term effects, if any, this had on the adult volunteer. What it did prove, however, is that you can force the brain to change your visual perception in a semi-permanent way. It caused a real physical change in the brain.
Any time you go hacking into things, there are unforeseen consequences. Saying to be cautious and don't let kids use it is likely a good idea until we better understand the possible side effects. It isn't like abstaining from 3D is going to hurt a 4 year old.
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Nintendo didn't pull the Virtual Boy because of its headache inducing red LED display, they pulled it because it was a shitty console that nobody bought.
No, they pulled the Virtual Boy because it was a completely terrible system both in technical and aesthetic aspects. There's no such thing as a Visual Boy, so I don't know what you're talking about, and I doubt you do either.
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In a cinema, the distance to the screen is far enough that this generally isn't a big deal: the rays coming from one point on the screen, by the time they hit your pupil, have diverged along such a narrow angle that they might as well be parallel (as if from an infinitely distant source.) But when you're in a living room with a screen in front of you,
Can't it be true in reverse as well? You appear to see an object coming very close to you, but the focal depth still says it's far away. At least in gimmicks where things would jump out at you from the screen there should be a fairly obvious difference to what the eye would see in reality.
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3D is harmful, especially for children. It is well known. Hollywood doesn't want to hear about it because they expect to make so much money off of it, nor do TV manufacturers, cable/sat, or content providers. I would rather see higher than 24 fps for films. Action scenes don't have to be blurry.
It's not over-cautiousness. This issue has been known for some time.
Children under about 10-12 shouldn't be exposed to any artificial stereoscopy as it can cause developmental impairment. Whether it's used for games is beside the point - movies and television pose the same risk. Really, any use of stereoscopy to create the illusion of 3D. The technology imperfectly replicates real visual stimuli from a 3D environment. Exposing children to it, particularly regularly or for long sessions, can cause the brain to try and adapt to the wrong set of stimuli.
Watching Avatar in 3D once is probably okay but should probably be avoided. Watching movies in 3D every weekend is probably bad. Using a 3DS daily for several hours at a time is probably going to cause some degree of harm. Gaming tends to long sessions, frequent use, and attentive focus.
Also, note that it's not "3D" itself that's the problem. We look at the real world all the time, right? The problem is that the methods used to create the illusion of 3D do not completely mimic the real thing. Stereoscopy is something of a first step. There has been research into systems which do a more complete job, and they can significantly cut down on things like headaches and simulator sickness. We'll probably see this in our consumer electronics one day, but all modern consumer 3D display technology has these issues.
Except there's no proof the systems actually do damage,
That's essentially false. There is proof that bad 3D can cause damage. There is no proof that the new 3D is "bad" because testing it requires subjecting children to a test that has, in the past, damaged children. It's unethical to determine if the current 3D technology will cause the same problems proven to have occurred in previous 3D technology.
So your statement is true in that not every possible combination of stereoscopic 3D has been proven to cause damage, so there's no proof that Blu-Ray 3D movies will cause damage. There's proof that 3D causes damage and no proof that this version doesn't. So, feel free to say it however you want. The technology used has been proven to cause damage, and they've not proven this one to be any better than the old versions.
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Except Sega had this tech and knew the problems in 1980s.
Given that I was under ten years old for most of the 80s, I'd really like to see those scientific studies. Honestly, America is so sue-happy right now, practically anything and everything I see from a company's lawyers I assume is covering their company's ass, and not in any way representative of actual scientific study. I would point out that most (if not all) cellular companies have similar warnings for their cell phones absolving them of any health issue due to radio waves (despite the lack of any valid scientific study linking radio waves to health issues).
To put it another way, [citation needed].
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What's particularly problematic is that you're better off just using 2D cinema. If you want to give it depth, there are techniques available that can make a 2D image seem very 3 dimensional. A lot of the old cowboy movies from the period after they went color are a good example. You watch the movie and your brain reconstructs it in 3D without glasses. Sure you don't get that gauche effect of hurling things at your face, but the effect of things falling away into the background is much more pleasing anyways.
The article is missing the point here. Nintendo is making a self serving argument here. The Syndrome is question occurs only in stereoscopic 3D. it does not occur in the "point of view" 3D that the Nintendo implement with it's motion sensors. There both eyes see the same image. the 3D effect arriese because the images tracks the motion of the controller itself, as though you were looking through a window pane.
Second, I would suspect that the Wii does not have enough horse power to generate steroscopic 3D (compared to the Playstation).
Third, even if the Wii could do it there would be another problem for the Wii. Given a 3D world you'd want to move in it right? But the wii controllers are not like the Kinect or Sony wands. The Wii only knows how you are pointing the controller, it does nor know the detailed spatial position or orientation of your body. So the effect would likely be disorientingly awful.
Hence Nintendo is playing this up.
It is however a supposedly real effect.
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Nintendo had a 3D system way back as well.
With all this controversy about 3-D and vision, what about kids growing up watching stories on their View-Masters?