Soldato
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Nintendo unveils 3DS and quickly follows-up with a statement about dangers to children under 7 playing with the company’s new portable gamer. Samsung releases a line of 3D HDTVs then issues a warning about its potential health risk to certain viewers. What they haven’t told you is that these warnings come after years of industry spin and cover ups. The truth is that prolonged viewing of 3D video may be even more harmful than the consumer electronics industry wants you to know.
Before you bring a 3D HDTV into your house or let a child under seven play with a brand new Nintendo 3DS, you need to understand the fragile development of an aspect of human vision called stereopsis.
Stereopsis: Hunter See, Hunter do
Stereopsis, a result of the frontal placement of our eyes, is the process in visual perception that lets us see depth. Two slightly different projections of the world enter our retinas, which causes us to see in real-3D. Stereopsis made us humans into mighty hunters of prey, builders of civilization and crackers-open of the occasional bottle of beer – but this important process is being tricked every time we watch a 3D movie.
Stereoscopic vision begins developing when we first start using our eyes and is generally considered complete by the time we’re around six years old. That’s when the tiny nerves and muscles behind the eye are fully formed and have learned to work in conjunction with the brain to respond automatically to visual cues that provide seamless depth of vision.
Unfortunately there’s a malaise in children that can prevent full stereopsis from developing, called strabismus. This condition is also called lazy-eye but has nothing to do with laziness; it’s an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes don’t focus on the same object and depth perception is compromised.
There is treatment for strabismus that involves helping a child’s nervous system to learn stereopsis, causing it to eventually become a natural response. But the ability to re-learn has its limitations, and treatment has been met with limited success beyond a certain age.
In the 1960s, Nobel Prize winning research by Drs. Hubel and Weisel came up with a critical period during which the optic nerves learn stereopsis – the time up to 7 years old. Doctors thereafter used this critical period as the point-of-no-return for treatment of lazy eye. The old way of thinking was that lazy eye can’t be treated after 7 years old.
However, recent medical science indicates that the nervous system never stops learning and re-learning. Doctors today will tell you it’s never too late to try to treat strabismus – or re-teach the optic nerves the trick of binocular vision. The chances of success may be diminished beyond seven, but there’s still a chance.
So, if it’s never too late for the optic nerves to learn correct vision, one can surmise that it’s also never too late to learn bad habits that could create visual problems.
“You Cannot Give This To Kids!”
Pesce says that Sega took the test results and buried them. Fearing lawsuits and consumer backlash over health risks, the VR Headset never made it to market and neither did the truth about the dangers of prolonged exposure to 3D virtual environments - until now.
The results of SRI’s research have been published and there is an unclassified document from the defense department of Australia that says there are a variety of “…unintended psychophysiological side effects of participation in (3D) virtual environments.”
VR Headsets disappeared amid vague rumors of headaches and poor implementation of a technology just wasn’t ready. The Consumer Electronics industry was content to leave it at that and wait for a new implementation of the same visual effects. Now, virtual reality is back but instead of a headset, the same visual effect is being sold through LCD monitors and glasses.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/warning-3d-video-hazardous-to-your-health/
Before you bring a 3D HDTV into your house or let a child under seven play with a brand new Nintendo 3DS, you need to understand the fragile development of an aspect of human vision called stereopsis.
Stereopsis: Hunter See, Hunter do
Stereopsis, a result of the frontal placement of our eyes, is the process in visual perception that lets us see depth. Two slightly different projections of the world enter our retinas, which causes us to see in real-3D. Stereopsis made us humans into mighty hunters of prey, builders of civilization and crackers-open of the occasional bottle of beer – but this important process is being tricked every time we watch a 3D movie.
Stereoscopic vision begins developing when we first start using our eyes and is generally considered complete by the time we’re around six years old. That’s when the tiny nerves and muscles behind the eye are fully formed and have learned to work in conjunction with the brain to respond automatically to visual cues that provide seamless depth of vision.
Unfortunately there’s a malaise in children that can prevent full stereopsis from developing, called strabismus. This condition is also called lazy-eye but has nothing to do with laziness; it’s an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes don’t focus on the same object and depth perception is compromised.
There is treatment for strabismus that involves helping a child’s nervous system to learn stereopsis, causing it to eventually become a natural response. But the ability to re-learn has its limitations, and treatment has been met with limited success beyond a certain age.
In the 1960s, Nobel Prize winning research by Drs. Hubel and Weisel came up with a critical period during which the optic nerves learn stereopsis – the time up to 7 years old. Doctors thereafter used this critical period as the point-of-no-return for treatment of lazy eye. The old way of thinking was that lazy eye can’t be treated after 7 years old.
However, recent medical science indicates that the nervous system never stops learning and re-learning. Doctors today will tell you it’s never too late to try to treat strabismus – or re-teach the optic nerves the trick of binocular vision. The chances of success may be diminished beyond seven, but there’s still a chance.
So, if it’s never too late for the optic nerves to learn correct vision, one can surmise that it’s also never too late to learn bad habits that could create visual problems.
“You Cannot Give This To Kids!”
Pesce says that Sega took the test results and buried them. Fearing lawsuits and consumer backlash over health risks, the VR Headset never made it to market and neither did the truth about the dangers of prolonged exposure to 3D virtual environments - until now.
The results of SRI’s research have been published and there is an unclassified document from the defense department of Australia that says there are a variety of “…unintended psychophysiological side effects of participation in (3D) virtual environments.”
VR Headsets disappeared amid vague rumors of headaches and poor implementation of a technology just wasn’t ready. The Consumer Electronics industry was content to leave it at that and wait for a new implementation of the same visual effects. Now, virtual reality is back but instead of a headset, the same visual effect is being sold through LCD monitors and glasses.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/warning-3d-video-hazardous-to-your-health/
