Byteside: “For All Of You Who Are Planning To Buy A 3DTV: For God’s Sake Don’t…”

The first episode of Byteside for 2010 was a great look into future trends for the technology industry, but the highlight of the evening for me was when Mark Pesce – one of the pioneers of virtual reality, co-inventor of VRML and regular judge on The New Inventors – told the audience: “For All Of You Who Are Planning To Buy A 3DTV: For God’s Sake Don’t…”

He went on to explain:

Your brain has about 10 different clues which it uses to detect depth. When you’re in the theatre [watching a 3D movie] you’re only getting one clue – which is parallax.

So what happens is while you’re in the theatre your brain is ignoring all of the other depth cues, throwing the other nine away and just training on the one. This produces a situation which is known technically as “binocular dysphoria”.

Now what’ll happen is you’ll leave the theatre and your perception – your depth perception – will be screwed up. It’ll snap back to normal [but] it’ll take different times – because people are on a bell curve, some will snap back immediately, some will snap back in an hour and so on.

Now I want you to imagine what happens when you’re doing that to yourself night after night after night. And, of course, we realised we’d be giving these systems to six year olds whose brains are incredibly plastic, and would actually be training to a new set of visual stimuli.

None of this has been thought through by any of the consumer electronics companies who are intent on giving you 3D. And it’s not a problem if you’re going to see a movie. But if you’re going to be using it night after night in your living room, it’s actually probably quite unhealthy.”

Pesce knows what he’s talking about. Aside from being an MIT dropout (according to Wikipedia at least), Pesce founded a company back in the early 90s which worked closely with Sega to create a virtual reality headset for the Megadrive. Back in 1994, he wrote about the notion of binocular dysphoria for Wired.

You can watch the relevant section of the show at the 43:50 mark, but really you should be watching the entire thing. And if nothing else, this should give you pause before you splash out thousands on a new TV later this year just because it has 3D.

ridiculous.
These people have no idea what they're talking about. The 3D effect does not untrain depth perception and, additionally, the assumption that children are better equipped to view the world is nonsense. Brain plasticity is remarkably elastic long into late age, and, combined with the understanding that children are the ones who would be the most sensitive to a degeneration due to a "lack of input", I can safely say that this article is ill-conceived and baseless.

Also, for the brain to actually miss out on a crucial stage for developing depth perception, the child would need to be deprived of all input, not just for a few, or even 8 hours a day.

I just also wanted to throw out there that parallax motion is the only actual visual cue we use to detect depth. Everything else requires brain interpretation. Shadows, Size discrepancy, continuity, etc etc. Parallax motion and steropsis are the only cues that use retinal disparity to tell distance, rather than rely on brain interpretation. Some cues are a mix, but really, if you are watching a 3D movie, the only variable being manipulated is the object's spatial disparity. All the other cues still exist. There are still shadows, there are still size variations etc etc. You are not "ignoring" the other cues, nor being trained to ignore them.

In fact, their idea does not even work in the reverse. Television does not have depth in it's picture. If anything, television is depriving it's viewers of input from which to develop stereopsis. Which isn't true, because the fundamental idea behind this entire argument is invalid.

" For god's sake Dont.... listen to me."

Haha this guy is way off.. id go on and explain my view on it, but i havent got the time and theprof00 kinda sums up most of it.

But one thing comes to mind. He fails to see how the usage works for a 3d tv. Its not all out 3d tv all day every day. They just support 3d.

I editted in some additional comments. I'm sure you'll find that it reads as "/thread" XD

I'm going to say, sorry, i'm buying one! Come on, "it's actually probably unhealthy", sounds like he got a BS in BS at MIT. You aren't going to watch everything in 3d, you'll be sitting in your living room where everything else but your tv screen will give you standard depth perception, much different than spending hours in a dark theater focused on a 3d screen. I'm a 3d nut, played HalfLife1 in 3d with 60hz shutters on a crt, and loved it. But some people just can't like my brother, it made him nauseous in just a few minutes. So I would recomend trying one first before buying.

more like a GED

"Television does not have depth in it's picture. If anything, television is depriving it's viewers of input from which to develop stereopsis. Which isn't true, because the fundamental idea behind this entire argument is invalid." - funny, it really did read as "/thread" :D

I think he's got a point, this alligator looks much more likely to harm that child than a 2d one. 

^ My God!! Im buying them!!