Is watching 3D movies good for your eyes or bad? I think it might be good, at least it seems to be for me.
Last weekend we took the kids to see Megamind 3D, which was great fun except four year-old Fallon and I both sacked-out for about 15 minutes during the second act, completely missing the death of MetroMan. Fallon had been pretty busy playing in Kung Fu Panda World that day so I can understand why he was tired, but I really had no excuse. Still, even though I saw only 80 instead of all 95 minutes of Megamind 3D, it had a profound physiological effect on me. I think watching the movie in 3D helped my vision. Am I alone in feeling this way?
As a guy with three young sons, I don’t see many movies in theaters, much less 3D movies, and Megamind 3D is the first film I recall having worn the darned 3D glasses for the entire show. And they weren’t the old red-green glasses, either, but new-fangled RealD glasses with circular polarization.
My eyes are terrible — 20/600 with some astigmatism thrown-in just for my left eye. I’ve worn glasses since before I was two years old, which is to say 56 years. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses.
So I sat through the imersive experience of Megamind 3D then afterward, driving home, everything along the road looked like it was in, well, 3D — beautiful.
Maybe sitting for those 80 3D minutes exercised my eyes in a new way, bringing up to par for a time my left eye, which has always been the weaker.
Have I been going through life mainly operating in 2-D? Maybe so.
My father lost an eye in an airplane crash when he was 51 and his depth perception seemed not to change much even though it had to have been based on the simple memory of how far away things appeared to be. It wouldn’t have worked for an infant, maybe, but my Dad had plenty of mental images in his memory bank to make it work.
So am I the only person to experience this effect? A lot of people seem to think 3D is bad for your eyes, not good. What would happen if I went to 3D movies all the time? Would my vision significantly improve?
I recently participated in a series of experiments, the most interesting of which was as follows: I took a stick with a small loop at the end, set my eyes level to a nail so that it was flat across, and hooked the end of the nail with the loop. I then did it again with one eye covered, which took me about the same time to complete. At that point, the tester told me that people with stereoscopic vision take much longer with one eye compared to two, so I must be using some other trick to figure out depth. And it was true; I actually twisted the loop so that I could see the back of it go behind the nail, and then brought it forward until it touched the nail. During another test I caught myself swaying my head back and forth so that I could use parallax without needing stereo vision.
I look forward to seeing the results the next time I go see a 3-D movie!
Interesting idea. I have similarly crappy vision with one short-sighted eye and one long-sighted & lazy eye and although red/green 3D never worked properly I have no problem with the ReadD system as I think it forces my lazy eye to do 50% of the work, something which my brain prefers to offload onto my other eye, the myopic one.
As a youngster I was forced to wear a patch to try and force my brain to use the lazy eye a bit more, but you can imagine how well that goes down as a 5yo – needless to say it wasn’t on enough to make any difference.
The concept is the same however, so maybe you are on to something. Now to convince my wife we need a new 50″ 3D screen and Blu-Ray player ‘to aid my vision’…
I think you probably experienced some hangover from the 3D movie, but not something long-term or any actual improvement. It just messed a little with your brain and you were more aware of the 3D nature of the world.
And as David N points out, people used to having two eyes should suffer a decrement in 3D performance, but there are tricks to deal with many tasks, especially if they are fairly near by, or if we can use parallax.
I’ve just finished reading Oliver Sacks’ recent book The Mind’s Eye in which he descrIbes a patient who gains or regains 3D vision after many years being unable to achieve this perception due to an eye disorder. It happened after she had undergone training to help her align both eyes when she focussed. Sounds very similar to your experience. Well worth reading the book.
You could also read the book written by the subject of Sack’s article:
Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions, by Susan Barry
You might want to look at the latest book from Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye”. He talks about a number of facets of vision, especially stereo vision. If you can’t get through the whole thing, at least look at the chapter “Persistence of Vision: A Journal” about his losing his own stereo vision.
Apparently people use a variety of depth cues, and some rely more on one than another. It seems that you don’t rely much on stereo. Yet you have the capacity to do so, and it was “juiced” by the movie experience.
For people who spend most of the day a couple feet away from a computer monitor, any kind of eye exercise is probably beneficial.
But that’s different than kids wearing these things for hours a day from preschool age on while their eyes are developing. Probably not a good idea.
I agree about the computing effect. I often notice it when I go outside after time spent on the laptop – I can feel my eye muscles struggling to focus for the first few seconds after I leave the door. Its mostly gone when I’ve gotten to the car, completely absent by the time I’ve driven 45 miles to the airfield. My eyes and mind feel fully refreshed after a sailplane flight or two: I’m certain that maintaining a proper scan while flying is beneficial for my eyes as well as saving my ass.
So Metroman dies? Thanks Bob, that’ll save me having to watch it now.
Nah. That’s an anti-spoiler. You don’t know what happens to MetroMan *next*.
Yeah, thanks for the superfluous spoiler – not.
“…completely missing the death of MetroMan.”
DUDE! SPOILERS!
Seriously Bob. Weak sauce.
Put binocular vision studies on your venture capital list.
I too have a lazy eye that has keep me from having binocular vision. I first learned this because the lolly-pop on the Evans and Sutherhland LDS-1 didn’t do anything for me in 1972 at Case where I was writing software for the beast.
So the news of new type of glasses that have a lingering effect leads me to want to try this type of 3-D.
The 3D is really going on inside your brain.
All you will ever see is a pair of 2D images, one for each eye. If its going trough a polarized glass or a green peace of paper doesn’t matter, being mostly a passive device (apart focus) your eyes will not be affected by the fact that the combined images of the two eyes make a 3D effect or not.
First, for those worried about the “spoiler” — it’s not. That’s when things get good …
I read a book as a kid (the name escaped me; it’s from the early 20th century) that gave eye exercises to improve vision.
They worked.
At least they did for me (need to drag that book out again). One of the principles is that switching focus from near to far — which happens during a 3D movie, more so in a theater than in your living room.
Or you could walk outside at night and take off your glasses. Cover up one eye, and look at the moon (or whatever is far away). Switch focus from moon to hand several times. Repeat with the other eye. Do this for a minute or two several times a day and you will see a difference in your vision.
You guys do realize that Bob, being the talented nerd that he is, possesses the nerd power of humor. This humor manifests itself via cynical, ironic, witty, self-deprecating, and often subtle ways. The “spoiler” would fall into that category. I.e., that was a joke.
Although I haven’t seen the movie so, Bob, if you weren’t joking, durn you. 🙂
I remember reading and hearing that the use of 3D in games and movies needs to be done in measure. There is a significant enough percentage of folks who if using 3D and playing game (say a flight simulator) will have motion sickness and mobility issues. The reason is they’ll see themselves going upside down and all around (and moving,) but the inner ear and vestibular system won’t be getting the normal queues. The awesomely adaptable brain will learn this new altered reality. When these folks return to true reality, their system is all out of whack. Therefore, when they go to do normal things like walk they will have trouble. It’s in a way like an LSD flashback.
Wait, Bob, did I read about that here?
You are a careful and honest observer of reality Bob . . . perhaps you have discovered something. My wife cannot see in 3D. It’s not that one eye was weaker, the centers of the brain processing information from that eye were weaker. As a child she was told to wear an eye patch over the “strong eye” so the neural pathways for the “weak eye” would develop. (a) she didn’t like the eye patch and didn’t wear it much (b) the condition was probably diagnosed too late anyway.
Visual perception occurs in the brain, not the eye. The optic nerve is an extension of the brain actually. The neurons of the brain have long tendrils that run out to the back of the eye socket.
So watching 3D alters the mind . . . sometimes, so does reading Cringely.
I studied ergonomics in college. Human vision is a very complex process. The things we see and how our brains process the input is amazing.
While the brain can simulate depth perception, one really needs binocular vision. While my eyesight has been close to 20/20 for most of my life, I would consistently fail the depth perception test when renewing my drivers license. Later as my eyes started sliding to 20/30 and 20/40 I started failing vision tests. Now I have to go to an eye doctor, pay them $100 for a real test…. I’d pass the vision test in the doctors office each time, but fail the license office test. On one visit to the license office I recalled my good college education and discovered something interesting. My eyes do not match the eyesight of the testing machine. I can only take the test using one eye! Once I figured this out — I started passing the depth perception test. But that doesn’t help me pass the vision test. Now each eye is at 20/40. Working together and with some brain power, my two eye vision is 20/30 — a passing value for a drivers license. But since I can take the test with both eyes — I fail.
Bob, with 20/600 I guess corrective vision surgery is out of the question. I am surprised you don’t have Borg implants.
Resistance is futile — we’re over 50 now.
Back in the 90s I went through a phase where I did stereoscopic photography using two cameras on a tripod. Some I did as stereo shots and with another camera I did lenticular prints. I also did stereo shots in the computer.
It was dramatic the difference in my sight – almost as if I had taken for granted the world as flat. I began to my world as 3D. something that still holds today.
Or maybe all you need to improve things is a 15 minute nap in the middle of the day?
The 3D glasses at movie theaters back in the 1950s were always polarizing lenses. Only when these 3D movies started being shown on TV and in cheaper theaters (like college student showings) did they switch to the red/green glasses.
The red/green glasses allowed the movies to be shown with a single standard projector or on a standard television.
I’ve paid extra for one 3D movie: Up, and I wasn’t too impressed. We saw the previews for GForce (or whatever that movie with Guinea Pigs were) and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Both of those previews gave me a headache because both were attempting to show how 3D they were. It’s like all those 1960s stereo records where they kept moving the sound from speaker to speaker to prove they were in stereo.
Seeing Up in 3D wasn’t worth the extra $4 per ticket. It really added nothing to the story, and that’s the problem with 3D. It is either a distraction, or you simply don’t notice it.
3D is coming out now for the same reasons it came out in the 1950s: TV. Back in the 1950s, movie studios worried about losing their customers to TV, so they did something you can’t do on a TV: Show 3D movies. After a few years, the movie studios decided that the extra expense wasn’t worth it and that people, even people with TV, will still see movies.
Now with extra large flat screen TVs, you see the same fear: Why should people go to a multiplex when they have a screen in their room that’s probably bigger than the one in a theater?
I believe Jackass 3D would give you 20/20 vision. The outhouse humor will
set your IQ back to 50 😉
Spoilers:
Johnny Knoxville vs Jared Allen and the everything exploding final scene are very good.
Completely unscientific; my eyesight always gets better when I start biking to work on a regular basis. I bike through the city
Interesting article Bob
I lost the sight in one eye when I was a teenager. I (like your father) retain good depth perception. I spent several years examining my own sense of depth and realised that binocular vision is only one of several queues that the brain is able to use.
The others include:
– movement from side-to-side, as in walking
– feedback from focusing
– relative aparent size of objects of known size
The interesting thing is that these queues kick in at different distances. Focus is good for close to the face, relative size is good for several meters away.
Binocular vision only seems to be critical for distances about one arm-length away, which is the only distance I have difficulty judging correctly.
Hope that helps!
I too have a lazy eye, but I can control it very well. I had a depth perception test in my Air Force days and scored perfect. The doctor said not to get the lazy eye fixed as it would not be aligned as well as it is when not “floating.”
The most fun is when I look at people with my right eye (good one) while letting the left float (outward). This is the normal behavior when I am tired. If I concentrate I can look at people with the floating left eye and ignore what the right eye is seeing… so it to the observe I am looking at them with my left eye and the right appears to be floating outward. Then I will switch back and forth each time they look at me. I would do this is school with teachers that made me sit in the front row.
The best is when someone is close (like across a desk or dinner table) and I can align my eyes in such a way that my right eye is looking at their left eye, and my left eye is looking at their right eye. So while they are shifting their view from my left to my right eye with both their eyes… my eyes are stationary looking at them… no left to right movement. It freaks people out.
BTW… I can also blow air out of my right eye which really freaks people out under water in a pool.
As for the person that that thinks corrective surgery it out of the question… it is not. I just had Lasik done (at 46) and I had about 20/600 with an astigmatism in each eye. I am now 20/20 in the right and 20/25 in the left. I am just starting to need reading glasses, but that is better than bifocals. Think about it.
The 3D used in televisions operates on a different principle, which is why they use active glasses instead of passive polarized glasses. Maybe TV 3D is bad for you, but I suspect movie 3D is fine.
There are very sound reasons why viewing 3D images will help your vision. Consider this: The image is present only on the surface of the screen. This is where your eyes converge. But, the mismatched images (which creates the 3D) causes your focus to fluctuate closer than and farther from the surface of the screen, which is a very extreme exercise that some people cannot perform with ease, hence the headaches. Regardless, the exercise is good for the eye muscles, especially if you have certain types of strabismus (lazy eye). For more information on viewing 3D movies and 3D in particular, visit this website:
http://digital3dstereo.com/tips001.htm
Mike Beech
In my haste in my previous post, I misspoke. I meant to say, focus tries to stay at the surface of the screen, while convergence fluctuates from nearer than and farther than the screen.
Mike Beech
I’m surprised nobody mentioned this yet, but there is good reason why the world should look ‘extra 3D’ after a 3D film:
3D movies are designed with some ‘average’ viewer in mind, the relevant average being average distance between eyes. If you are not average, which not too many are, then during the film your mind basically has to get used to a new inter-eye distance. During the film lots of stuff is going on so the brain basically does this adjustment subconsciously. When we learn things on a subconscious level like that they have to become more automated, so they stick better than they perhaps should.
The upshot is that when we get out of the movie our brain has, to some extent, forgotten how far apart the eyes actually are. Perhaps things appear further away than they should, making everything ‘more 3D’, or perhaps it’s just a consequence of the brain relearning proper distance judgement, but either way it makes a lot of sense that distances would pop out at us for a while.
This doesn’t necessarily help vision. But I do think 3D screens are good for vision since it lessens the unnecessary strain of focussing the same all the time. I would buy a laptop with a 3D screen just for the purpose of reading news articles set at whatever simulated distance I wanted at the moment.
I experienced something similar the first time I saw 3D movies (or pictures for that matter). My vision is at least as bad as Bob’s (worse, I think – 20/500 is when you can’t read the big E on top of the chart… I can’t see the doctor standing next to me asking if I can see the ‘E’ on the chart) and it has always been that way since I was very little.
With glasses, thank goodness, I could see fine and I never really thought about the difference between ‘depth perception’ and 3D. I never had a problem with depth perception but apparently I was just interpolating it from the relative movement of nearer and farther objects. Much the way you would interpolate distance looking at a picture or a 2D movie. There was nothing wrong with my 3D viewing ability… I just never noticed it – never seemed to use it until I saw a 3D movie (It was The Last Buffalo in 3D IMAX many years ago) and after that I suddenly realized there was all this two-eye 3D information available to me I just hadn’t ever noticed it as being what it was. It’s hard to describe the epiphany of that moment when I could not only see relative depth, but 3D! Everything looked… different… afterward.
After that I tried some experiments and discovered that I totally lost the sensation of 3D when seeing blurry images as when using some lower powered glasses. I would not at all be surprised if everyone who had poor vision when they were very very little has some kind of different depth perception experience than most people have with 3D.
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And it was true; I actually twisted the loop so that I could see the back of it go behind the nail, and then brought it forward until it touched the nail. During another test I caught myself swaying my head back and forth so that I could use parallax without
airplane simulator…
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