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3D Hurts Your Eyes
sajjadG writes "After experimenting on 24 adults, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley has determined that viewing content on a stereo 3D display
hurts your eyes and your brain. This can supposedly cause visual discomfort, fatigue, and headaches According to the article, 3D content viewed over a short distance (like with desktops and smartphones) is more visually uncomfortable when the stereo content is placed in front of the screen. In a movie theater, it's the opposite: Stereo content that is placed behind the screen causes more discomfort than scenes that jump out at you. With the explosion of 3D-capable gadgetry such as televisions and mobile phones, understanding just what this kind of technology is doing to our bodies may help us better use it in the future. The only problem is that technology tends to far outpace research, and until we get a better handle on its effects, we're more or less walking blindly into a 3D world."
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I think you a good point on this one.
How does this hurt the brain? Isn't it just the eyestrain that gives the headache? I thought the brain itself had no pain receptors.
They needed to do an experiment to figure this out? The millions of people that say it constantly wasn't proof enough?
The millions of people were just holding their glasses wrong. Or bringing their car floor-mats to the cinema. Or something else, like intentionally exploding their laptop batteries.
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First of all, there's no way to know if two things are separated by a volume of space unless you have a headache. That's how evolution works: the cerebral nerves were caused to evolve specifically by Darwin in order to function as a kind of animal cruelty version of Pavlov's dog in which mapping three-dimensional space actuates the occipital squinting reflex, causing us to narrow our eyes meaningfully at expansive vistas while also wishing for acetylsalicylic acid and a glass of water.
Scientists consider this sort of thing basically self-evident, like the existence of atoms or Jenny McCarthy.
Furthermore, the so-called Disney Cortex is capable of parsing dimensionality exclusively through parallax; in effect, the neck pain caused by this subtle lateral shifting of the head is conveyed via the uvula directly into the cranial brain-case, tapping into the same area of sensitivity exploited by the spatial depth pain discussed above.
Elementary biochemisphology tells us that the only way stereoscopy can function effectively in the real world of fake entertainment is by pulling out all the stop and going holographic, so that the images can be processed and hurt us in as natural a way as possible. This is God's way of telling us that the Holodeck was cool.
Fad researchers have understood this for centuries, since the time the Illuminati first started actively repressing news of the stereoscopic newspaper in 1743.
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These stories are free but worth money.
Not without your time-machine, bitch.
These stories are free but worth money.
That's because it's not 3D; at best, it's 2½D. The back side of the objects are not projected. There are true 3D projectors that create objects that are viewable from all sides (without special glasses). I call them 3D-in-a-box. You can stand in front of it and see things in 3D while somebody else can stand on the other side of the projector and see the other side of the objects (in 3D). I wished they stop lying by calling it as 3D but that's not likely to happen. :(
Don't stop where the ink does.
No kidding ... I have seen two movies in 3D, and will never see another. I had eye strain and a headache for several hours after.
I am not paying more to see the movie if it hurts, but, given that everybody else seems to like it, I question how long before I have no option but 3D.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Those are particularly harmful to the brain.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I don't go to 3D movies anymore because of the eye strain. I think it's because my eyes want to focus on things other than what the director has chosen to be the point of focus, and they can't. In Avatar, the scenes where there were bugs in 'front' of the screen caused my eyes to water.
My brain knows it can't focus, but the instinct is to try and focus. Possible if I viewed enough 3D-like movies, I could overcome that instinctual urge.
Avatar was visually stunning, but I've seen it again at home and don't think the 3D effect really added that much to it.
Went to see Harry Potter earlier this week, and decided to wait a half hour and not see it in 3D. So it looks like I won't get to continue my own personal experiment.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
well obviously no because its actually there.
flicker-shuttered parallax effect at 60hz per eye showing two different images is a bit different than continuous light reflected from an object, strangely enough.
$100 million for the lawyers, free movie tickets for the "class"...
What's worse: The article says less than the obvious can go. It doesn't say anything about the effect of jumps between scenes of different depth, about stereo strobbing effects that appear when using a small frame rate, the straining effects of overly dark 3D displays in some cinemas, etc.
And with so little people you can't correlate personal characteristics of the viewers with the strain and headaches - I'm a sensitive person, and I get headaches from watching a normal cinema from too close or from an unusual angle, from watching a LCD monitor when the other lights are out, from using a closeup display (e.g. cellphone) in a moving vehicle, and I don't have any issue with 3D unless some exacerbating effects are present as well, which in my case would be dark picture or the screen being too close.
http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.abstract
Where am I seeing anything about 3D hurting eyes in here? This might just be the worst slashdot heading, summary, and linked article in a while.
The whole study is trying to measure specific angles and distances where 3D is uncomfortable. There's nothing about 3D actually hurting eyes.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Have we reached peak verb?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Uh you can get statistically significant results with a small sample size if the effect is strong. For example, if you toss 24 coins from a bag and they all turn head, you can be pretty sure that the coins in the bag are not all fair coins.
Yes, the sample size is "statistically valid." You can show a statistically significant result using any sample size; using a smaller sample simply means you need stronger evidence to show the same significance. There are some specious statistics in the paper, but this criticism is plainly false.
TechCrunch (Along with Ars Techinca and others) got it completely wrong.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/samsung-studies-3d-viewing-discomfort-finds-out-bloggers-dont/
If you read the study, and not the abstract, you'd know they didn't actually watch any 3D. They tested different situations of focusing on various objects to find out WHY some 3D hurts peoples eyes. They did not "find that 3D hurts your eyes" becuase that's not what they were looknig for.
In fact, they discovered the comfortable range for 3D viewing is wider than previously thought.
But you have to actually read the study to know that. - link to the study: http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.full
If you hate 3D, hate 3D, but actually read the article before throwing your two cents in.
--Richard Lawler, Engadget
"I'll be your huckleberry" - Doc Holliday - Tombstone
We well peak verb and are slow to oblivion.
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I am yet to see a 3D movie. I tend to be a bit susceptible to motion sickness, and I can pick up on and be annoyed by a 60-70Hz refresh rate on a CRT that doesn't bother anyone else. And even if none of that is a problem, i'm just as likely to fall prey to the negative placebo effect, going into a movie just knowing it's going to make me feel sick :) I kind of suspect that this is the reason a lot of people have a problem with 3D.
Setting aside the fact that this "experiment" had some very obvious flaws, does anyone really care if it can potentially give you a headache? We all stare at computer screens all day and that is very clearly terrible for our eyes and gives us headaches!
in ui design I learned that people are sufficiently similar that you can test on 7 randomly chosen subject and if your ui work on all of them it will be good for 95% of the population, those 5% be damned. People are not that different inside so unless you are looking for a 1/100000 effect you don't need a big sample, around 30 will be sufficient in most of the case, I don't remember the mathematical proof but it exist.
However if your are doing a research on something with a great variance like food preferences you will need a bigger sample. You can read more about the optimal sample size in those paper : http://www.ime.usp.br/~abe/ICOTS7/Proceedings/PDFs/InvitedPapers/3J3_ALIA.pdf and http://nordbotten.com/articles/OptSampleSize.pdf
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I question how long before I have no option but 3D.
I share that concern. In my small family of four, my wife and son are OK with 3D while my daughter and I are not - we get headaches from it. Yesterday the kids had a cousin over and they were going to see Captain America. I asked the cousin if she wanted to see the 3D or regular and she said (without any prompting), "3D gives me a headache, can we see the regular one?". So it seems to be fairly common. I believe I have seen statistics that say about 15% of people get eye strain or headaches from 3D. I believe there was also a correlation to certain conditions affecting visual acuity (for example near sighted). I personally had very good vision up until these last couple of years but am now (due to getting older) becoming far sighted.
Yes it's 3D, it has 3 dimensions. It's not virtual reality, and doesn't claim to be. You can't wander around it and see it from the back. What you can do is infer the depth based on the stereoscopic effect, just like you can infer height and width based on surrounding objects.
You can't see the back of things, you can't re-focus on something that the camera didn't focus on. Yes it's gimmicky and limited. But there are 3 dimensions, and if you want to count time (as in watching a movie) it has 4.
I think you just regurgitated from an article here posted a while back without really thinking about what you've said, but if you managed to come up with the exact same deivel independently, I have to applaud your stubbornness.
"But the real world has 4 dimensions, and it doesn't have those limits, how can you call it 3D if it's limited?" The real world is the real world. When we can simulate that, it will be called holography or something more interesting than 3D. The real world has smells, no one complains about those missing in 3D. The real world has things like neighbors making noise, interrupting phone calls - I think we would be happier with a limited simulation, even when we get to that point.
The experiments were to determine specific zones of comfort in relation to different 3D displays. It wasn't to determine whether or not viewing 3D is good/bad for the brain. The techcrunch article totally misinterprets the study.
Why do research like this on just 24 people?
Because you have to start somewhere. If all human studies used hundreds or thousands of people you'd have not even 1/100th as much research done. We don't have an infinite amount of cash or of decent scientists.
That is NOT a statistically valid sample size.
I somehow think the good people of UC-Berkeley realize that 24 people is a small sample. Studies of this size are usually done to suggest and design further studies, or because the premise is interesting but that particular team doesn't have the resources for a larger study; everyone who matters understands that these small trials rarely prove anything at all. It's just arrogant and ignorant to trot out sample size arguments in response to every single damn study with less than 1,000 people as if it proves you're smarter than every scientist and grant reviewer involved.
Furthermore, sample size isn't everything. If I pulled 24 frogs all with 13 legs a piece from a lake that I knew to contain 150,000 frogs I would not think "that is NOT a statistically valid sample size", I would think "Jesus Sideways-Hopping Christ, somethings wrong with this lake!". It's quite possible to get data from a small sample that is quite clear and quite certain. Many amazing discoveries in physiology have been made with sample sizes in the single digits. They had to be reproduced with hundreds of other samples by dozens of other people to check method and provide absolute certainty, but they were effectively undeniable as originally published.
The annoying thing is people dumb enough to read a study done on 24 people with any ambiguity at all in the results and go on reporting that it's a new discovery. Well, that and insouciant bastards like you who get off on thinking they're smarter than entire research departments.
Falling from a great height can hurt, you can't fly by simply flapping your arms, and farmville still sucks.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
Since the last few 3D movies have done over half their sales in 2D, I wouldn't be too worried. There's a pretty good 3D backlash building up. If they really start only showing some things in 3D, don't see them at all. Money talks.
Nintendo's learning that with the surprising weakness of the 3DS.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
http://slashdot.org/submission/1454046/3D-Cinema-Doesnt-Work-And-Never-Will
the source of the discomfort is that millions of years of simian and primate eye evolution has created an eye that focuses and converges in parallel
look at a mountain, and your eyes are pointed nearly straight out, and are focused wide
look at a book, and your eyes are slightly cross-eyed, and are focused close in
but, for million of years, this focus and this convergence has always been in parallel. millions of years of our ancestors have never had the need for eyes that, for example, cross in, but focus wide, or point straight, but focus close in. 3D expects our eyes, to, for the first time ever, or, since tens of millions of years ago, take your pick, to work in this unnatural way, unnatural for primates
much like blind cave fish or flightless birds: if the function is not needed, the ability atrophies. of course, BEFORE binocular vision, animals with eyes on either side of their head, for example herbivores and ungulates and certain primitive carnivores, can certainly focus, converge, and even point in independent ways. look at a chameleon: its eyes are pretty much independent entities neurologically and physiologically
but this has not been the case, since before even our distant lemur-like ancestors really started working binocular vision, for our bloodline to have eyes that focus and converge on different tracks. we simply can't do it any more without stress and pain. so this is the source of the discomfort with 3D technology, physically and mentally
there is also some concern that very young eyes, that are still developing, can actually be permanently harmed by 3D
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I had a Ninetendo 3DS for about two months before I realized I couldn't handle the 3D effects. I literally went from feeling buzzed to headache in about 45 minutes.
But the real world is 3D - perhaps the difference is the implementation of trickery, which is why 3D often seems more 'fake' to me than a 2D film.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
How long before someone in America (with the highest percentage of ambulance chasing lawyers) tries to file a lawsuit, or class action lawsuit based on this.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You probably meant statistical significance and it doesn't just depend on the sample size. It also depends on the noise and error in the thing being studied.
You don't know how grant money works. It's not really possible to spend grant money on hookers and blow - mostly because they don't you receipts and partly because Dell doesn't sell blow and you can't charge hookers to the hotel bill without it being extras and such.
Iirc, researchers working for Sega found something similar related to 3D games and children back in the 80s.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
The only reason I don't have a 3Ds is that when I was looking at it, I didn't have the money in the bank to pay for it. It was pretty mind blowing in terms of what I was seeing. I'm guessing the bigger problem is all those checks the government has been sending to the rich at the expensive of the working classes that's causing that weakness. It's hard to find money for a luxury item when the costs of most things one actually needs are going up in price significantly.
I read elsewhere that this study or one like it was funded by Samsung, HTC's competitor. If that is true, it makes the study AstroTurf.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I am sure there is absolutely no correlation between 3D and visually-related discomfort or fatigue, just like there is no correlation between the constant viewing of computer monitors and TVs at close distance with myopia, or the lack of exercise and constant consumption of fast food with obesity, or the smoking of cigarettes with lung disease, or the shortage of doctors with rising medical costs, or the debt funded government with rising federal deficit, or lastly, reality with things being real.
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If I flip a coin 24 times, and 22 times it comes up heads, that is indeed statically relevant. (No I did not RTFA, as I hate 3D and openly advocate for anything that diminishes it. I'm a biased sample, who might report a headache, which would back up your point above).
Gently reply
Am I the only one with this weird problem? After having seen several movies in 3D, it dawned on me that I never had any visual memory of what the 3D effect looked like. For example, take How to Train Your Dragon. I remember that "the 3D was great". I remember the fact that several specific scenes looked friggin' awesome in 3D. I can even explain what was great about each scene. But I can't bring up a visual memory of what the scenes looked like, 3D-wise. All my memories of the movie are flat. When that began to sink in, 3D movies lost a lot of their allure. Knowing that, once I left the theater, the memories I was left with would be no different than if I'd watched the 2D version removed some of the incentive for paying extra for that 3D effect.
You know, my dreams are flat, too. I wonder if that's related, somehow.
------RM
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If you clicked through TFA and read the actual abstract, you'd find that they found that stuff behind the screen with the screen at distance was more likely to cause discomfort, and stuff coming out of the screen with the screen at a short distance also more likely.
It also went on to discover that the necessity for refractive correction in a person's eye's was a good predictor of whether someone feels discomfort.
So if you're getting a headache, your eyes are probably a lot less than perfect already.
Yes they needed experiments to figure this out because 100 slashdotters whining about "3d SUCKS!" isn't actually useful or informative. Finding the reasons and mechanisms that some people get this effect is actually useful.
such kind of news should just be banned. They serve a self-feeding stimulus which will create a chain reaction when going to see or use any kind of 3d (please call it stereoscopic) capable hardware. People will feel discomfort for no reasons other than focusing and expecting a non existent problem. It is called the placebo effect as we all know. Also even in the remote possibility that it really cause some discomfort, it is a so mild problem that seeing n hours of 3d content over few months will surely train the majority. It's like saying mountain trekking can lead to severe body stress , all kind of muscle pains and so forth, yes of course, when you do it first time. Please wake up and don't fall into this bullshit.
I didn't get headache or anything like that but I couldn't see the movie! I couldn't read subtitles, they were all blurred (luckily I understand spoken English). If the 3D effects was in the middle of the screen I couldn't see them clearly but if they were on the sides I could make something out of them. So I missed half of the movie (Thor) and have to go see it in old fashion 2D. Glasses were working fine and my date sitting next to me could see the movie just fine so it must be something with my eyes. If you have problems with eye vision (distortion, squint) like I do, I don't recommend 3D at all.
You don't know what you don't know.
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I have seen two movies in 3D, and will never see another. I had eye strain and a headache for several hours after
I've seen a few of them myself, because for some reason I kept going back thinking that I might like it on a better movie... or something like that. After seeing Avatar, I won't go back to another 3D showing but not because it gives me a headache or makes me uncomfortable (though it does, to an extent), but because the false focusing and perspective cause me to miss things.
It's one thing to watch a film: you stare at the screen for two or three hours straight, letting your eyes and ears get lost in the sights and sounds while your brain works on understanding the characters and the story. With 3D, I inadvertently spend so much time thinking about what I'm supposed to be looking at that I miss visual or plot elements.
Just my two cents, of course.
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I went to see HP7b. I could choose to either view 3D or not at all. So there I sat with silly glasses and seeing it as I always do. No perception of depth and no negative effects on my brain... I think... I assume... I hope, OK?
Come to think of it, the term 3D does not take time into account. 4D would be better. And we can add a couple of Ds for the sound. I tried explaining this to my son. Don't know if he really got it. Anyway, my strabismus finaly pays off
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Recent increased usage of stereo displays has been accompanied by public concern about potential adverse effects associated with prolonged viewing of stereo imagery. There are numerous potential sources of adverse effects, but we focused on how vergence–accommodation conflicts in stereo displays affect visual discomfort and fatigue. In one experiment, we examined the effect of viewing distance on discomfort and fatigue. We found that conflicts of a given dioptric value were slightly less comfortable at far than at near distance. In a second experiment, we examined the effect of the sign of the vergence–accommodation conflict on discomfort and fatigue. We found that negative conflicts (stereo content behind the screen) are less comfortable at far distances and that positive conflicts (content in front of screen) are less comfortable at near distances. In a third experiment, we measured phoria and the zone of clear single binocular vision, which are clinical measurements commonly associated with correcting refractive error. Those measurements predicted susceptibility to discomfort in the first two experiments. We discuss the relevance of these findings for a wide variety of situations including the viewing of mobile devices, desktop displays, television, and cinema.
Keywords: stereopsis, depth perception, vergence, accommodation, discomfort, fatigue, displays, asthenopia Citation: Shibata, T., Kim, J., Hoffman, D. M., & Banks, M. S. (2011). The zone of comfort: Predicting visual discomfort with
stereo displays. Journal of Vision, 11(8):11, 1–29, http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11, doi:10.1167/11.8.11.
This has been "discovered" every time 3D comes around, which seems to be every 20 years or so.
Somewhere, Navin Johnson, the inventor of 3D glasses is saying,
"I don't need anything...
except this ashtray...
The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, and this magazine, and the chair.
If you clicked through TFA and read the actual abstract, you'd find that they found that stuff behind the screen with the screen at distance was more likely to cause discomfort, and stuff coming out of the screen with the screen at a short distance also more likely.
So basically you're saying that they've discovered the discomfort when viewing 3D movies has to do with the 3D effect? Amazing!
And the need to wear glasses exacerbates it, given the changes it makes to the focal point of the eyes, a core component of stereoscopic vision? Mind Blowing!
By that argument, you can infer depth based on cues present in regular 2-D movies, so should they be called 3D?
You don't need to be able to walk around the movie and view it from the back for it to be true 3D, but in true 3D you would focus your eyes to the same depth as the apparent stereoscopic depth, and movement of your eyes would change your perspective. Neither of those things are present in the current crop of "3D" movies, which is why they are uncomfortable to watch.
Actually no, if you remembered anything from statistics class then you would know that if all the results from the 24 people had a strong correlation then the research team could easily end up having a certainty value in the very high 90s
In fact as long as you are not seeing any real outlines in then data then everyone after like the 21st person really only contributes to a tiny-tiny bump in certainty.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Not true. If you add a definition of the true 3D position of each point in the 2D images and the direction from which they receive light (corrected for lens effects, if necessary) two 2D images will define the 3D position of every point visible to both images. (they, of course, won't define the unseen backside of the scene) If you don't add those definitions, you have to derive estimates of them from the information in the images themselves, or else you just have two, or three, or an infinite number of unrelated images.
P.S.: a 2D plane has the same number of points as a 3D space.
Maybe I'm just in the minority, but I have never had a problem with 3D, and I've seen all kinds of 3D - red/blue anaglyph, green/yellow anaglyph, active-shutter, polarized, lenticular. I've never had eye strain. My wife, on the other hand, gets a headache with red/blue anaglyph but not with any other form of 3D. None of my three kids have ever reported eye strain after watching a 3D movie in the theaters. My only problem with 3D right now is that my TV is only three years old and I can't justify buying a new 3D TV! I want my 3D gaming!
I understand that some people do have problems with 3D; but I wonder if the problem is with the technology, the way that the technology is implemented (insufficient brightness), if it's possible psychosomatic, or a combination of the three.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I haven't read TFA yet, but the headaches are easily explained. Stereoscopy isn't the only thing that makes 3D. Besides stereoscopy and various forms of perspective, the eye's focusing distance tells the brain how far away something is as well. So you have your eyes' focus telling your brain an object is six feet away (the distance to your TV set) while the stereoscopy tells your brain it's two or fifteen feet away. That causes the focusing muscles to fight the eye positioning muscles.
You won't have that problem when you hit 40 and your eyes' lenses get too hard to focus (the reason geezers need reading glasses). I'll have to RTFA to see about the "brain damage" part, but it might explain the occasional painless optical migraines I get since I had the implant in my left eye.
I was going to link wikipedia, which used to have a very good article on optical migraines, but it's gone, and a search by someone who suffered one might freak out even more than he will when he gets one It differs from a retinal migraines in that it's in both eyes, and is entirely in the brain and has nothing to do with the eyes at all. this article is full of errors; the article that has obviously been pulled (or google is acting up again) but it's close. There were illustrations in the one that was pulled that were exactly like what happens when you have one. When it's happened to me, it was never followed by a headache.
I hightailed it to my eye doctor the first time I had one, and was told it's nothing to worry about and had it explained to me. It was after that I looked it up ion wikipedia and found the article that isn't there any more (two or three years ago).
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No, they needed an experiment to show that the effect was reproducible in a controlled environment and to gain some idea of what causes it. For example, they can now say it is not a matter of incorrect focus between two cameras, psychosomatic, or just the result of really bad movies trying to use the wow factor to scrape together a decent return in the box office.
More importantly, the problem appears to be intrinsic to the current 3-D projection systems. It's not going to be fixed through incremental improvements to the technology.
Next step is characterizing the risks. At the low end, we are pretty certain that the occasional 3-D movie has never done more than give someone a passing headache. We have no idea what routine daily exposure might do to the proud new owners of a 3D TV. Perhaps nothing, perhaps a slow decline in depth perception eventually leading to a significant increase in their death rate due to auto accidents.
I just RTFA, it says nothing about hurting your brain. Phew!
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It's called a preliminary study. It's not a bad idea to work out kinks in methodology and to make sure you're measuring something useful before committing resources to a study on thousands of people, don't you think?
Or you can learn how to calculate p-value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
TFA doesn't say there's damage to your vision or brain. You're out the price of an aspirin and a movie, hardly anything to sue over.
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As technological improvement far outpaces the research on potential health risks maybe the government should enforce a process like the fda has for new drugs. It would guard security of consumers and throw technological progress back light years. I guess for now we have to stick with trial and error.
Aside from looking at too bright light it's virtually impossible to damage your eyes just by looking at something. This goes for reading a book in dim light or watching a tv in the dark. None of these activities damage/hurt the eyes. Strain them, make them tired, yes. Damage no. Your mother was wrong.
The two 3D movies I saw didn't cause me any stress, but I just don't see the big deal. The 3D seems muddled and artificial to me. Like trying to show someone a nice painting by either carefully illuminating it on a wall, or setting it on fire and bashing them in the face with it.
When John Baskerville invented a process for making smoother paper, and printed books with the blackest ink and whitest smoothest paper ever seen, Benjamin Franklin said that people would go blind. Others took up this claim, although today almost all books are printed on paper every bit as white and often as smooth, and with inks every bit as black.
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By that argument, you can infer depth based on cues present in regular 2-D movies, so should they be called 3D?
That's called "perspective", and there are various forms of perspective that painters have been using for hundreds of years.
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hysteria >>> fact.
Every time.
"I'll be your huckleberry" - Doc Holliday - Tombstone
Your P.S. made me wonder if that result used the axiom of choice. It doesn't have to--it can instead use the Cantor-Bernstein-Schroeder theorem (ref). More interestingly, I stumbled across the Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem, which says "A non-empty Hausdorff topological space is a continuous image of the unit interval if and only if it is a compact, connected, locally connected second-countable space." Second-countable can be replaced with metrizable. Since any eg. unit hypercube in Euclidean n-space has the required properties, there is a surjective (continuous, even) function from the unit interval onto it. However, inverting it to give an injective function from the hypercube to the unit interval would need to use the axiom of choice (or more assumptions on the type of function HM gives; in the link above they leverage the explicit form of the Hilbert curve to avoid the issue). Still, it's interesting, and I think I believe AC anyway.
You should take a course in statistics. One thing you will learn is that there is no fixed number that constitutes a "statistically valid" sample size; it depends upon the standard deviation of the population, which can differ for different types of measurements. Moreover, a sample size may be too small to be valid for one study design, but perfectly fine for another study design. For example, very often individuals vary quite a bit from one another, but the reaction of each individual is quite consistent. In that case, you can get by with a much smaller sample if you can do a "within subjects" study design.
If the sample size were really too small, then the results would not satisfy tests of statistical significance. The fact that they do argues that the sample size was fine.
This seems to be a very nice, careful study, and the discussion of which conditions are more likely to provoke discomfort is likely to be useful to producers of 3D media. It does not, however, provide a great deal of support for the view that discomfort from this source is likely to be a major obstacle to the popularity of 3D media. For most of the conditions, even when the effect was statistically significant, on the average the subjects ranked the discomfort of the stereoscopic displays only slightly greater than that of the 2D displays. In particular, the effect size was pretty modest compared to the standard deviation
The finding that individuals are highly variable in the degree of discrepancy between accommodation and vergence that they can tolerate supports the approach adopted by Nintendo with the 3ds, which allows the user to adjust the magnitude of the 3D effect. A video game can do this because the 3D effect is generated "on the fly." With a movie, the only control the viewer has is seating position. Most stereo content in a 3D movie has a virtual location "behind the screen." The study argues that people who experience discomfort with 3D movies should adjust their seating position closer to the screen.
The finding that objects displayed with a virtual position "behind" the screen cause greater discomfort at large distances, whereas objects displayed "in front" of the screen cause greater discomfort at short distances make a lot of sense. Greater distance from the screen exaggerates the 3D "depth" of the image. On the other hand, images that appear "in front" of the screen require a more "cross-eyed" eye orientation for convergence, which can be tiring to the eye muscles. For a given distance between the right-eye and left-eye images, an object will "pop out" from the screen a constant percentage of the viewer's distance from the screen. But what is probably more important in terms of comfort is the convergence angle of the eyes, which is greater closer to the screen.
And this is true for movies in 2D as well. In a 2D movie, perspective and motion parallax gives the impression that objects are at different distances, yet your eyes have to focus and converge a single plane, the plane of the screen. Even worse, objects on the screen may be out of focus, yet no matter how much you strain to bring them into focus, you cannot. Worse, the image is substantially distorted if your seat is not precisely centered in line with the center of the screen, so your brain has conflicting cues: perspective and motion parallax indicating that the image is 3-dimensional, yet focus and convergence cues as well as image distortion indicating that it is not. In one respect, stereoscopic displays reduce the discrepancy, as the convergence now agrees with perspective and motion parallax (although still not with focus).
And indeed, there are many people who claim that 2D movies hurt their eyes or give them a headache. And in fact, in this study, the average discomfort from the stereoscopic stimuli was only slightly greater than that discomfort from looking 2D stimuli.
It seems that with each new entertainment/communication medium, people worry that it will ruin your eyes. Reading was supposed to ruin your eyes. So was watching TV up close. Yet there is no evidence that either is harmful. To some degree, the discomfort that people feel may simply be unfamiliarity with watching shows in stereo. Modern films include many cinematographic techniques--rapid cuts, jump cuts, views from unnatural angles--that were once considered to be so disturbing that viewers would not tolerate them. Yet with familiarity with cinema, the public's tolerance of these devices has increased.
They aggravate us with a tendency to get those, which is all i need to know to avoid them.
And yes, i unfortunately did try it with one 3d movie. Never, ever again.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
in ui design I learned that people are sufficiently similar that you can test on 7 randomly chosen subject and if your ui work on all of them it will be good for 95% of the population, those 5% be damned....
Well that explains why UI's seem to suck.
7 random people isn't going to represent 95% of the population.
Be seeing you...
That, and turning on 3D kills the battery life. Why would I turn on a gimmick when it makes the platform less usable?
That's probably because they knew the Warner logo was the best 3D effect they'd see in that movie.
With most recent movies, 2D hurts too. But that's mostly because of screenplay.
"So basically you're saying that they've discovered the discomfort that a minority of people experience when viewing 3D movies has to do with how the 3D effect is used?"
"And the need to wear glasses to correct your vision (not the 3d glasses) is a good indicator of whether an individual will suffer from discomfort or not "
FTFY
"Mind Blowing!"
Indeed. And different from what you think it is.
Perceived distance in stereoscopic imagery is determined by where your eyes cross, if they're not parallel. Infinity is when the parallax, the distance between the position on the left- and right-eye images, is 85mm apart (the distance between your eyes). On a small screen the actual number that represents infinity is going to be smaller, and thus appear at some finite distance between your eyes, and in the movie theater it could potentially be greater than 85mm, meaning... farther than infinity somehow (your eyes are looking away from each other instead of looking in parallel directions or crossing).
And I'm just now reading the article and it actually describes this, it's worth reading: http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.full
Wonder what the public key field is for?
the real article
-- no sig today
Yup. Just like Galileo needed to do an experiment to prove that heavy objects fall faster than light objects when millions of people already knew this was the case.
Millions of people are often wrong. And even if they're not there are no figures for how significant the effect is.
Subtitles in a 3D movie who ever thought that this was a good idea? I know that many many countries (my own included) rely on subtitling the movies they import because the general populous can't understand the movie's language but there really is a point where a feature becomes just a fashion statement/gimmick....
And don't go telling me that subtitles in a movie don't hurt the 3D effect, because in all movies I have seen they did (And I don't even pay attention to subtitles normally).
But hey I can do with subtitles, what I can't do with is having to be driven home after a 3D flick because you are too wasted to drive yourself!
I'm happy that now there is some substantial scientific data about this, that I can use to educate some of my ignorant peers!
-- no sig today
Indeed. Plus the Idiotic Blurring that is always inherited from the 2D footage of the movie and just is wrong when displayed through stereoscopy...
-- no sig today
Well, hurting you brain i a not permanent way it does. That's also the reason of the misunderstanding of the title line, since 'hurts your brain' is some times perceived as 'permanently damages your brain'. But what you can take from the article is that the enforced contradiction of focusing distances is a strain on your brain (which is not set up to deal with such paradoxes, I think)
-- no sig today
http://www.3dtouch.de/3d-brillen/3d-brillenaufsatz/44-3d-brillenclip-fuer-kino-3dtouch-5501.html
A large potion? What age? What digital equipment? Real Nerds and Geeks? I know a few and they don't agree with you. If someone has a 20' TV to watch movies at home, he propably won't like 3D movies, because he does not like 2D films enough to invest in a decent TV Set in the first place (provided, he could - no offence to poor people intended).
Those people or people with lame PCs AND no gaming console are propably not the target group for 3D movies, you know...
You are choosing to define 3D as having the ability to change focus, which is not what 3D is trying to be, and it never will be. And yes that's why it confuses a small percentage of people's senses. It's a 3D projection onto a 2D space, but it presents a different view to each eye.
So why do you choose a definition of "true 3D" which requires more than just having 3 dimensions? Why not define 3D as "What you would see if you focus on the same thing the director wanted the focus on"?
Put another way, if you insist that 3D has to allow for refocus, we'll have everything from 1900 to holograms under the same 3D label. The current trend towards 3D in TVs, gaming, movies, and now phones, all represent 3 dimensions, but will not have re-focusing capability any time soon, since de-facto standards are already in place.
Why can't we agree on this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2098674&cid=35917198 If it was good enough for my parents, it's good enough for my kids (until science shows it's not, which hasn't happened yet).
We have discussed this ad nauseam in here, over the years.
Nobody gets eye strain and headaches from 3D. That's what you do all day, all your life (except you had lost the use of an eye, of course).
What you get headaches from is actually stereoscopy, 2D with some depth information.
And not everyone likes those! I for one was doing leading stereoscopy research a quarter of a century ago, and I can promise that I don't get headaches nor eye strain. But you'd have to flog me to one of those so-called 3D-displays; for quite another reason: The so-called 'depth' is a very strange decoration-like effect consisting of more of a structure of layers than depth. Yep, I did try, again, in one of those expensive high-end shops some weeks ago, with a 5-digit US$ exhibit of a piece by the company with the 4 letters, the first being an 'S'. I used their sales arrangement, their acreen, their glasses, and watched their demo movie, with a waterfall. (Maybe some of you have seen this as well?) As much as there was 'depth' in the water tumbling down, the front contained a forest. It took me no more than 30 seconds to spot the loony: the forest in front had no depth at all. It was rather like a two-dimensional theater decoration. Then I knew immediately that zero progress has been made on '3D'. Actually, that's impossible, theoretically impossible, because 2 2D-images do not contain a 3D-space. They can logically not contain a 3D-space.
Ask, if you wanted all the gory details.
But, please, never tell anyone that 3D hurts your eyes and brain.
I'd mod you up if I could. You're about the first in here to point out that those companies ought to be flogged for calling 2 2-dimensional images '3D'. You right with the focus, though there are more artifacts that render it impossible to obtain 3D from a stereoscopic image.
Funnily enough, I never had these problems with the old red-blue 3d glasses. It's just with the ones they have now that I have problems. And oddly, I actually thought the movies done with the whole red-blue thing (sorry I'm really not aware of the actual technology behind it) looked a LOT better. They seemed more 3d, where things would actually pop out at you, rather than the foreground just looking slightly closer than the background. /. has some ideas for why this is, as I have very little concept of the technology behind it.
Hopefully someone on
You are choosing to define 3D as having the ability to change focus, which is not what 3D is trying to be, and it never will be.
This is blatantly wrong, alas. You see 3D every day in your life (if you have no specific vision impairment). And so does everyone around you. And for most of us, it works perfectly well. The term is used too loosely by the manufacturers. One ought to force them to remove their misnomer and call it 'stereoscopy' instead, and I'd be perfectly happy. And it wouldn't have clouded your own argumentation. Replace all '3D' in your post (except of the first) with 'stereoscopy' and you'd get mod marks from me.
Almost all video, with the exception of a few animated films, is 3D, in that it depicts a 3D world, and causes the brain to construct a 3-dimensional representation of the action. Stereoscopic vision is only one of many cues that the brain uses to infer the three-dimensionality of the world around us. Others include perspective, motion parallax, and accommodation.
So does the 24 Hz refresh rate or the 48 Hz flicker of a regular movie bother you?
So does the 24 Hz refresh rate or the 48 Hz flicker of a regular movie bother you?
I think I can kind of notice it on bright scenes but it doesn't really bother me. I thought that what I noticed on computer screens was the beat frequency of the CRT + ambient lighting, but even with all the lights off and just a bit of sunlight I can still notice it.
I also notice the new LED taillights on cars. They flicker. Nobody I've met notices it but it's definitely there. You can exaggerate the effect if you move your eyes from left to right rapidly - the taillights leave a dashed trail in your eyeball instead of a constant trail.
Fortunately CRT screens are mostly a thing of the past. We have 2 CRT TV's in the house which never seem to bother me... probably because the flicker is so obvious. My second screen at home on my laptop is an old 19" CRT but the refresh is 75Hz so I can only notice it right out of the corner of my eye. But that's about all the CRT's I use anymore.
If someone can sue because they burned themselves due to their own carelessness with a hot cup of coffee at a McDonalds drivethrough, and win... Need I say more?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
That is all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I question how long before I have no option but 3D.
We have actually switched cinema for this very reason. The local cinema shows pretty much every movie in 3D only until about a week before closing at which point the non 3D sessions are at some silly time like 2:30 in the afternoon on a weekday.
We now travel 10min further to get to the next cinema which doesn't have leather seats or 3D, and has slightly smaller screens, but also provides us fantastic entertainment at half the price of the local megaplex.
You fall in the 5% like almost everybody here.....
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
IIRC the coffee was close to 200 degrees. If they had served it at a drinkable temperature, like 160 degrees, she wouldn't have needed plastic surgery on her groin because 3rd degree burning wouldn't have occurred in 2 seconds like it did. Or maybe you just think you're really good at getting women's pants off.
So why was the coffee that hot? Because their nasty burnt coffee smells better when it's that hot, apparently.
They needed to do an experiment to figure this out?
Yes. That's what makes it science rather than gossip or hearsay.
Science is when you take a hypothesis (whether accepted by the public; "fake 3D hurts people's brains" or not; "time varies with speed and gravitational field strength") and test it rigorously, trying to eliminate all other variables. Just because something is commonly accepted as being true (or even worse, "it's just obvious") doesn't make it true; it still needs proving (to the relevant degree).
It seems there are thee attitudes to a scientific discovery from the "armchair scientist"; if it agrees with his preconceptions, it's obvious, so the scientists were being silly for (and wasteful) testing something that we all knew already. If it disagrees, the scientists are wrong, they've just made mistakes which come from living in their ivory towers. If it's on something that he hasn't thought about, it's an example of scientists wasting their time on theoretical nonsense that doesn't really matter.
Is it any wonder we live in a world dominated by politics and marketing (not that the two are that different) rather than logic and science?
From the "National Coffee Association of America" web site, Your brewer should maintain a water temperature between 195 - 205 degrees Fahrenheit for optimal extraction. So you are wrong, the temperature they brewed and served it at was the right one (assuming they sell enough to be constantly brewing it so it doesn't cool down much if at all). If you are an idiot and place a hot coffee between your legs in a moving car, you are going to get burned. Maybe you are too delicate to drink hot drinks, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be prepared and served in the most optimal way for flavour. If the drink is too hot, let it cool down. But don't stick it between your legs while you are waiting and then sue someone for your fucking stupidity.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
But what you can take from the article is that the enforced contradiction of focusing distances is a strain on your brain (which is not set up to deal with such paradoxes, I think)
The brain is amazingly flexible and can learn to cope with about any situation. I wore thick glasses all my life until I got a cataract in my left eye from prescription eyedrops to treat an infection. I had surgery on the eye, and they replaced its lens with a new type that sits on struts, allowing it to focus. So now my left eye is better than 20/20 at all distances, while my right eye is 20/400 plus since I'm over 40, that eye won't focus at all. So now I wear no corrective lenses, and even though everything beyond about fifteen inches is blurry with my right eye, things at a distance are clearer with both eyes open than with just the good eye open.
If I get the right eye operated on, my brain will have to adapt again, but it will adapt. The brain is the most amazing organ in the body.
Free Martian Whores!
Even though it was her own fault, she did suffer financial loss, and her doctor bills were all she was asking for. When McDonalds refused to pay the lawyers were called in. Had she not suffered financially, no lawyer would have likely taken the case.
However, thinking about it, I guess someone could run up psychiatrist bills over this and sue. So I'm probably wrong.
Free Martian Whores!
The other day I went running. I thought it would be fun, as haven't gone running in years. Today my legs are so sore! After some research on the web, I found that there are thousands of people that have sore legs after running! Clearly, this is some sort of health risk, and there is a conspiracy between the athletic supply companies to keep peddling their wares and suppressing discussion of the discomfort brought on by running.
I, for one, will never run again. I will encourage my family and friends to do the same.