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Does 3D Make Your Head Happy Or Ache?
MojoKid writes "Nintendo has quasi-acknowledged that its 3DS can cause headaches and should not be used by children under 7. The glasses-free 3D handheld gaming device launched this week. Meanwhile, new research commissioned by the Blu-ray Disc Association is trying to improve the health image of 3D. Its research shows that the brain is more attentive when watching a 3D movie than when watching HD or SDTV, making the movie a more pleasurable experience. The issue, doctors say, is that 3D works by tricking the brain into making you think you are physically moving in relation to your surroundings. But you aren't. So your inner ear is not experiencing the movement that corresponds to what the eyes are seeing. This doesn't normally happen in real life. No one would deny that 3D is more immersive; that's why people like it, particularly for gaming. But the question is ... does the brain love 3D or not? Answer: not really."
I can enjoy about 15 minutes of 3D stuff, before it starts making my head hurt. Always has, across the various different technology types.
But the worst part about 3D is the movies that have only (poorly) implemented it as a gimmick or afterthought to try to wow in more sales.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
No one would deny that 3D is more immersive
Oh, really?
This 3D world makes me sick! 3D trees, 3D people, 3D buildings...
That's why I just prefer to spend my whole time staring at my 2D computer screen in my parents basement.
@neonux
3D movies and such have been around for a very long time. It was a marketing gimmick then and it still is. There is little additional value to the entertainment experience and in general, we are willing to sacrifice quality for volume. MP3, JPG, and cellphone audio quality are perfect examples of consumer willingness for lower quality but higher convenience. 3D adds a lot of cost and complexity, but little additional benefit. And mostly, I am not going to buy my teenagers $120 glasses just so they can watch more TV.
The more you scare people.....the more they will pay.
Not much else is new. It's happened before the advent of 3D screens. More interesting is the eyestrain issue. It seems less severe when the 3DS is used in the dark, but I wonder if people will adjust to it eventually? Much like how someone has to adjust to their first pair of glasses? I haven't used a 3DS personally yet, but it sounds like a similar sensation people are experiencing..
*disclaimer: The important part of my post has been marked bold
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
It gives me a photo-epileptic seizure, so no thanks.
The article implies that part of the reason for headaches is the 3D video causing your brain to believe you're moving about, while your inner ear does not agree. However, the source the article cites says that this causes nausea, not headaches. I would think this is similar to getting car sick.
Knowing what I know through common sense, I think that headaches from 3D video are caused by your eyes crossing in order to line up the disparate images, as they do in a true 3D world, yet not changing their focus, since all objects on the screen are at the same distance and therefore same focus.
It's a parallax barrier display. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_barrier
It's possible because Nintendo have a very good idea at what range and angle you'll be viewing the display.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
3d in current tech is less real looking then 2d images. Sense the offset can only project images in a cone that pinpoints at your face, and the widest point at the screen distance, you become aware of the 'sides' of the world. Where a well shot 2d film sucks you in nicely. Furthermore, while not the case with 3ds, but for sure the case with blu-ray, a part of the film is always out of focus. This is not how your eyes perceive the real world! 2d films are more realistic , sorry. Not till they have real holographics will it be better. Also the films are darker due to the glasses and the overlay. The 3ds has less frames per second. In 2d mode, you get 60fps, at full 3d setting, 30fps, half for each image.
your inner ear is not experiencing the movement that corresponds to what the eyes are seeing
It's possible for something pretty close to this to occur in real life. The two that come to mind from personal experience are bicycling on a very flat/smooth road and skiing in deep fresh powder. Both give your inner ear very little movement to detect and so you have lots of visual stimulation with very little corresponding motion feel. And that's what I equate my 3D movie watching experiences to--a "floating" feeling. I wonder if those who get sick have fewer real-life experiences to equate it to and their brains haven't been "trained" in the disconnected feelings? Just conjecture....
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
This means we will probably be sold special earphones in the future to stimulate the ear into movement to counteract the eyes. Yet more accessories and expense to the technology.
Earphones? Still tricking the senses? Noo... nothing below a "3D Immersion couch" to compensate for the lack of surround movement... to be supplemented by anti-inertial gizmos to keep one's beer steady (and still carbonated) and the salty chips/popcorn in the bucket, while the "3D couch" rocks. See why.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I have Graves Disease. I get nausea a lot. I have meds that suppress the disease, and the side effects are more nausea. Surprise!
On a good day, with little amounts of 3D, I'm fine. One a bad day, I can't even watch my Netflix queue on my xbox queue scroll sideways. I hate it when the only version of a movie that is available is in 3D. These days I'll wait until I can find a regular version, or not watch it.
I won't even attempt the Nintendo 3DS.
Even if you watch a movie without 3D, you are "tricking the brain into making you think you are physically moving in relation to your surroundings." There is a large overlap in the neural circuitry that processes motion parallax (the 3D effect that you get when you have a moving camera) and stereopsis (the 3D effect that you get when you have two different images projected onto your two retinas). This is the mechanism behind 3D animated GIFs, and one of the major depth cues in a 2D movie. Motion parallax is even more intricately linked to the vestibular system, since you need to know whether the image on your retina is changing because your head is moving or because the object you are looking at is in motion. (This is probably part of the reason that an ordinary movie is not an immersive 3D experience.) In contrast, stereopsis does not require motion to work as a depth cue, although all of these depth cues are ultimately integrated.
The potential for motion parallax without vestibular signals to alter the development of visual areas dedicated to depth perception seems at least as great as the potential for moving stereoscopic images without vestibular signals to alter the development of these areas. No one knew about this when the motion picture was invented, and kids who grew up with a TV are still perfectly capable of making use of vestibular signals.
Overall, that 3D is somehow "bad for the brain" is highly speculative. You don't get a headache or nausea when viewing 3D movies from very close up because you are damaging your brain. The malaise doesn't even necessarily have to do with the lack of a vestibular signal, and quite possibly doesn't, since you don't get nausea from simulated camera movement without associated head movement even though you have conflicting cues there as well. It can come from the visual system alone. If you are close enough to the screen, you are viewing 3D images with such high disparity that you can't fuse them. The brain interprets this as a sign that there is a problem with your visual system. You might even feel sick to your stomach, since in the environment in which we evolved, this kind of problem with your visual system would most likely have been caused by ingesting some kind of harmful psychotropic substance. There is absolutely no evidence that there is any permanent damage to or alteration of the brain itself.
If someone can show that there is any change in cortical thickness in the visual areas of children exposed to 3D movies from a very young age, or that these children exhibit significantly different performance in some set of psychophysical paradigms, I might reconsider, but the "evidence" presented in this article is complete bullshit.
My wife cannot watch 3D, old tech. or new, it always gives her a headache and/or makes her nauseous so we won't be getting a 3D tv. When faced with a 3D movie or nothing option at the cinema (usually when taking the kids), she either doesn't wear the glasses or blanks out one len with a piece of paper or card.
We did manage to get a couple of pairs of glasses for our regular cinema and "adapted" them to have two right-hand lenses (doesn't look great but so what) so she can use both eyes but only gets one perspective which means a clear image but no headache. However, as different cinemas use different technologies, we can't use these at all outlets.
We consider 3D to be a gimmick and nothing more - if the movie can't hold its own without having to resort to cheap (or not so cheap) 3D special effects then we're not interested. Case in point - Avatar, nothing more than Dances With Wolves In Space and, just like Dances With Wolves, a thin story line dragged out about an hour too long but with an overdose of animation instead of long wilderness panoramas.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
In this article researchers claim that "3D makes the brain 12% more attentive" .... Depending on agenda this could be easily respun as "3D makes the brain work 12% harder".
I can't believe how bad it makes my eyes hurt then in turn, my head hurt as well, I mean it's like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer or something. Jere http://www.thenerdblurb.com/.
The Nerd Blurb - If a Nerd Doesn't Know, No One Knows!
I personally cant play any 3D FPS games displayed even on regular 2D screen. I get motion sickness... I cant even imagine how fast I would get sick playing something like this 3DS...
Billions of $ are spent to upgrade entertainment technology in the hunt for corporate profit. Cinema 3D films with odd colors and flickering 3D glasses are being hyped.
Whatever happened to the immersive story line? The acting?
(Where is that darn Kurosawa DVD collection...? I had it here somewhere...)
No, that's not the worst issue. Walter Murch describes in an entry on Roger Ebert's blog, the convergence/focus issue, where the eye is expected to work in a way that millions of years of evolution never designed it to, where your eyes are asked to focus on an image very close, yet converge very far away. A quote from the article:
"But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point. ...
Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to "get" what the space of each shot is and adjust."
The latter part being bad news now that quick cuts are all the rage.
What I was trying to say is that immersiveness is driven by character development and plot, not the color accuracy, numbers of pixels, or subjective dimensions. The human mind is easily able to compensate for the latter, but not for one-dimensional characters and a vapid, insipid plot.
Peter Pedant says it is not 3D: it is pseudo-3D, but I guess that does not sound good on the box !
WEll done 3d? I am very tolerant of. The real3d stuff that is actually shot in 3d for imax is FANTASTIC... Medicore 3d like Avatar, and utter crap 3d like Tron3d.. less tolerant.
I always have the same feeling though and my mind knows it's all fake because when I look at something my eyes want to focus on it and then return to the focus plane of the screen, this instantly gives my brain a "it's fake" signal. Some people, like my wife, are highly bothered by that "it's a fake" signal although the best imax 3d films she can tolerate... Probably because they are so tack sharp and completely fill her field of view compared to the out of focus tiny slit crap in regular theaters.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.