Is 3-D television the future of entertainment? A very different perspective.
With all of the hoopla about the coming era of 3-D television emanating from the PR folks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas recently, you’d think that our entertainment overlords had it all planned out. Even porn will be in 3-D.
Not so fast, says Virtual Reality pioneering technologist Mark Pesce, and he ought to know. In an editorial posted this week on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., Pesce writes:
Back in the 1990s I did a lot of development work in virtual reality — another technology destined to be the Next Big Thing. I helped Sega develop a head-mounted display (fancy VR headgear) that could be plugged into the Sega Genesis (known as the Mega Drive in Australia). Everything was going swimmingly, until we sent our prototype units out for testing.
Virtual reality headsets use the same technique for displaying 3D as we find in movies or 3D television sets — parallax. They project a slightly different image to each one of your eyes, and from that difference, your brain creates the illusion of depth. That sounds fine, until you realize just how complicated human depth perception really is. The Wikipedia entry on depth perception (an excellent read) lists ten different cues that your brain uses to figure out exactly how far away something is. Parallax is just one of them. Since the various movie and television display technologies only offer parallax-based depth cues, your brain basically has to ignore several other cues while you’re immersed in the world of Avatar. This is why the 3D of films doesn’t feel quite right. Basically, you’re fighting with your own brain, which is getting a bit confused. It’s got some cues to give it a sense of depth, but it’s missing others. Eventually your brain just starts ignoring the other cues.
That’s the problem. When the movie’s over, and you take your glasses off, your brain is still ignoring all those depth perception cues. It’ll come back to normal, eventually. Some people will snap right back. In others, it might take a few hours. This condition, known as ‘binocular dysphoria’, is the price you pay for cheating your brain into believing the illusion of 3D. Until someone invents some other form of 3D projection (many have tried, no one has really succeeded), binocular dysphoria will be part of the experience.
This doesn’t matter too much if you’re going to see a movie in the theater — though it could lead to a few prangs in the parking lot afterward — but it does matter hugely if it’s something you’ll be exposed to for hours a day, every day, via your television set. Your brain is likely to become so confused about depth cues that you’ll be suffering from a persistent form of binocular dysphoria. That’s what the testers told Sega, and that’s why the Sega VR system — which had been announced with great fanfare — never made it to market.
In other words, keep doing that and you’ll go blind.
None of the television manufacturers appear to have done any health and safety testing around this. That’s a pretty serious statement to make and a notion that is likely to gain traction as the 3-D tech gets rolled out. The idea of legions of class-action lawsuits from a generation of TV and video game addicts should be enough to give the major electronics giants pause … or, at the very least, a very major headache.
