Danger of 3D Displays that you may not Know

Excited about the new upcoming 3D Displays? You could now see your favorite characters come out of your tv or computer monitor. Thats great right? If you look the good sides of it then you should also consider a few things that are not. Though 3D visuals rendered by the tv screens are stunning, there are some dangers too.

When viewing 3D visuals you’re actually tricking your eyes and mind into a feeling that there is depth where there isn’t. But it begins to look less like a trick and more like a serious deception if we add two things into consideration: one, that perceiving depth is an active process that involves muscles and movement, and two, vision is a learned skill.

I’ll make this much more simpler. When you focus on a nearby object say your monitor and when you look on a distant object like a tree, your eye knows to perform some transformation in your eye muscles and the lens inorder to bring those objects into focus. But, when you see an object in a movie, your eye quickly tries to adjust to that object’s distance by deforming the lenses but this doesn’t actually happen. Your brain thinks, “That car should be coming into focus!” But it doesn’t and it won’t for the foreseeable future, and meanwhile every time the focus changes, or the shot changes, or the camera moves, or the characters move, your eye is attempting to refocus, to change its shape. This creates fatigue in the muscles and confusion in the brain.

For example, you’re looking at the main character, but glance at a moving car in the background, an action which can be involuntary. When you track something coming closer to you, your eyes converge more and more until, as it comes right up to your nose, you’re maxed out, cross-eyed. But when something moves toward you in a virtual world, your eyes attempt to converge more in order to keep it centered, and it doesn’t work; they must keep the same angle of convergence the entire time. This isn’t a hard task in itself — we all keep a single state of convergence intact for long periods whenever we see a movie, read a book, or work in front of the computer for a long time. But unlike in 3D movies, when you’re doing those things you’re not receiving conflicting depth cues maliciously suggesting that your eyes need to be rotating to keep things in focus. And every time your eyes try to do so, to look at something closer or more distant than the current object, they produce no results and so must give up. Actually, they do produce results — in the form of more eye muscle fatigue and headaches.

This might seem silly, but there have been reports of people having depth perception trouble after watching a 3D movie at home or in the theater.

Most of the things return to normal and so as the eye. This could be bearded by mature eyes. But when a child’s visual system is taught with a significant portion of its input being a virtual 3D environment on a 2D physical plane, the brain will form with such a system being “legitimate,” possibly to the detriment of normal vision. And this is without reckoning the potential damage from the lack of visual variety such a child would experience.

A child exposed to excessive amounts of 3D media may not only develop incompletely due to lack of stimuli, but may develop incorrectly due to the presence of misleading stimuli. So its better to limit the child’s interaction with the 3d monitors and tv until the toddler reaches at least 6 years of age or much more.

Here are a few things that you could consider doing about it

1. If you are a diehard entertainer and cant miss out the 3d visuals make sure you buy the best 3D monitors or TV. This is because slow LCDs and shoddy synchronization are bad for both you and the image.
2. Avoid watching the 3D visuals for a continuous period of time. Make sure you take breaks in between. Its hard to stop in between a movie. But this is a must when considering our safety more important than entertainment.
3. Never buy active shutter-based displays
4. Its Good To Wait until 3D gets better : Its a good idea to wait for some time until much advanced and more safer things evolve in the 3D arena. Early adopters would make the wrong move compromising their safety and money.

3D is definitely a superb thing which can entertain you even more and take you to another dimension visually once its early sprouting pains are over.