Noticed this bit of news on /. today and it should temper the recent enthusiasm for stereo 3D promulgated by 3D cinema.

1. SEGA discovered how serious the danger for children was 15 years ago after asking Stanford Research Institute at Palo Alto to study the safety of VR and buried the results: http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/warning-3d-video-hazardous-to-your-health

2. While this article only discusses kids, it is nowadays known that the eye muscle training setups used to treat strabismus (and conversely, can induce it) which operate on the same effect that stereo 3D does (forcing convergence different from what the default is for the subject's eyes), are also effective in adults: http://www.strabismus.org/all_about_strabismus.html#latetreatment

1 + 2 = if you use stereo 3D regularly and intensively, you will develop strabismus, period.

What this means is that shutterglasses, VR helmets, polarized projection with passive glasses, and all autostereo like Cubicvue's stuff, parallax barrier, and lenticular arrays, are ALL DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH unless used sparingly.

I would be surprised if we don't see class action lawsuits start popping up within years. Only displays that provide consistency between stereopsis (convergence) and accommodation (focus) are medically safe for significant usage. Since holographic and volumetric displays are not really practical, this means that only tunable focus microlens arrays and tunable focus direct retinal projection are left...

[Edited by - Prune on June 27, 2010 12:48:19 AM]

It would be nice to explain medical terms that most people won't know the definition of if you want to discuss them. For all I know, you just said 3D technology gives you pimples.

Wikipedia link
Essentially lazy eye (or similar).

Personally, the only 3D I've been remotely interested in is the 3DS, and even that I want to try first. Having things pop out at you in movies doesn't help my enjoyment personally, so I don't really care about this news at all. I will care slightly more when they do a study on adults, rather than extrapolating based on the effectiveness of specially designed therapies.

A proper link to the article in question (or what I presume is the article).

I'd also be interested in knowing the details of the study whose link is cut off in your OP (woop got fixed by the time I posted)

Is it only prolonged use? excessive use? what? I can imagine watching a 3D movie once a week for a couple hours would mess your eyes up that much unless you spend the rest of the time walking around with your eyes closed.

1. I have corrected the links.

2. I stand by my post and my extrapolation is valid. The relation between strabismus and stereopsis without accommodation is established by the SRI research quoted by the SEGA representative, and "rather than extrapolating based on the effectiveness of specially designed therapies" is not a counterargument of any sort. A study in the future would be great, but before it is performed the danger has already been established based on the quoted related results and simple logic, just as supercritical chain reaction was established by extrapolation before the first nuclear detonation occured.

Quote: Original post by PruneI stand by my post and my extrapolation is valid. The relation between strabismus and stereopsis without accommodation is established by the SRI research quoted by the SEGA representative, and "rather than extrapolating based on the effectiveness of specially designed therapies" is not a counterargument of any sort. A study in the future would be great, but before it is performed the danger has already been established based on the quoted related results and simple logic, just as supercritical chain reaction was established by extrapolation before the first nuclear detonation occured.

The article says specifically for children under 7. While I would like to know more details, it seems that the vast majority of us should be fine. The stereoscopic interpolation thing they talked about in the article would raise concern, but I'd be curious how well the effect actually works before condemning it.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care
The article says specifically for children under 7. While I would like to know more details, it seems that the vast majority of us should be fine. The stereoscopic interpolation thing they talked about in the article would raise concern, but I'd be curious how well the effect actually works before condemning it.

Did you see the second link I posted?

Quote: excellent success in many older patients and at least partial success in most patients older than 6 years of age. There are numerous studies that demonstrate that treatment after the age of 6 is very successful. One study compared treatment before age 6 to treatment after age 6. They found no statistical difference between the two groups. As a matter of fact, loss of an eye in patients over the age of 65 who were never treated for their amblyopia experienced a spontaneous improvement in vision in over one-third of the cases.

(amblyopia is constant strabismus)

Also, from http://www.strabismus.org/strabismus_cure.html it is seen that one of the two main treatments for strabismus is orthoptics (eye exercises), which forces one of the eye through say prism glasses to look in a different direction, i.e. have a different convergence (stereopsis) than its natural tendency due to accommodation (focus).

But the mismatch between convergence and accommodation is the quintessential feature of every planar-focus stereo 3D system: glasses, VR helmets, autostereoscopic monitors, etc.

Playing this down is a public disservice and the sort of thing I would expect more of Nintendo's PR department than forum posters here.

Quote: Original post by Prune
Did you see the second link I posted?

Similar results in treatment is not the same as similar results in the cause.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2careSimilar results in treatment is not the same as similar results in the cause.

Not in general, but in this instance it is obviously the case, since both work by forcing the eye muscle to a different default convergence. This is very, very basic logic here, and I'm flabbergasted that I have to explain this. A perfect analogy is bending an arrow sign. The treatment is equivalent to bending it to point to the right direction when it was wrong before. In prolonged stereo 3D exposure without matching focus, it's equivalent to bending it from the correct direction to another one. This is exactly what is done to the eye muscle, correspondingly, by orthoptics and by stereo 3D.

I'm sorry, but you can't just stand up and say "My extrapolation is valid!" and expect anyone to care.


As someone who has worked with VR research, which even included a 2 month period of using VR Augmentation from morning to night, the worst that ever happened to me was a minute or two of mild disorientation after removing the set. (Yes I wear glasses, but they're the same ones I wore before the experiment.)

Is there concern of a health risk in adults? Yes. But it has not yet shown to be widespread, or even real.

I think strabismus is a perfectly normal thing under 3D cinema/vr. The only important question is whether it's permanent.

Very clearly, you must develop strabismus while under influence of stereo 3D due ot the way it functions. Normally, the brain must coordinate the eyes so they properly look at the same spot in space. With 3D VR stuff, some technology (shutters, polarization, whatever) delivers different images with the appropriate parallax to the two eyes, so the brain gets to see a proper 3D image, even if it does not do any "work" for it.

Now, I could imagine that this may be a problem for young children since possibly the brain won't properly develop the "normal" connections. However, I wouldn't readily believe that it causes a kind of "degenerative brain damage" on an adult brain, unless it's used for many hours per day, every day. This would be analogous to people being unable to walk because they drive to work.
I would expect that you might be a bit dazzled when taking off the VR glasses after using them for 3-4 hours, but that's about it. The brain should be able to cope with that and take up its normal work again.