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."

Comments

Re:What I have been telling people.

[spazdor]

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.