3D entertainment and its impact on your eyes

The first 3D movie I saw in the cinema was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger
Tides in 2011. Expecting something great I was really disappointed because instead of
being spectacular it rather gave me a headache followed by nauseous. How does this
3D movies work and what is its impact on my eyes?
Director James Cameron waited more than a decade for technology to catch up with
his ideas for a movie called Avatar. He developed special cameras and 3D software to
capture his unique movie. In 2009 the movie was released and according to the BBC
it rapidly became the biggest grossing film of all time, in part because of its groundbreaking digital 3D technology (Dowd, 2012). This was 3D quality people never have
seen before, it was not just objects flying out of the screen towards the viewer, but 3D
as an immersive world, creating another planet to explore.
Avatar became so popular, because of the new 3D technology Cameron used.
However, 3D movies themselves were invented decades before 2009. Stereoscopy or
3D imaging was invented by Charles Wheatstone in 1840 (Zone 2014, p.6). In 1890
William Friese-Greene filed a patent for the first 3D motion pictures. Years followed,
where studios and filmmakers were searching for ways to display their movies in
three dimensions. The first commercially released 3D film was 1922's The Power of
Love. This was also the first 3D film to make use of anaglyph glasses: the blue and red
glasses. Unfortunately, The Power of Love did not achieve wide release and the film
has since been lost.
Due to a booming post-war economy, more consumers and theatre owners were
interested in the new technology. The 1950s were the first golden age of 3D
filmmaking. But after some successful movies, the 3D vanished from the cinema
screens. In 1970 another technology was developed by a company called Stereovision.
That caused the second boom of the 3D filmmaking. In 2005 a new area of 3D
filmmaking started. According to Zone (2014, p. 6), this is called the digital 3D
Cinema: Stereoscopic movies are driving the proliferation of digital cinemas.
To understand why some people are feeling sick while watching a 3D movie, an
explanation about how 3D movies work is needed. Charles Wheatstone did not
actually invented 3D imaging, it was rather a simple discovery of the obvious. (Zone,
p. 8). We can see in 3D, because we have two eyes with binocular vision. The left eye
sees more of the left side and the right eye sees more of the right side and the brain
fuses those images together allowing to see in three dimensions. This is known as
stereoscopic view.
To prove this fact, Wheatstone created a device with two centred mirrors at 45
degrees to each eye and reflecting right and left eye images. This was the first
instrument designed to view such images and to produce a three-dimensional effect.
Around 1850 David Brewster introduced the viewing box or stereoscope. Two images
of the same subject were placed inside a viewing box which used lenses to converge

the images onto one another and allow the illusion to work. As described in William
Friese-Greene's original patent in 1890, stereoscopic 3D films were broadcasted on
two separate screens. Viewers could then see the screens through a stereoscope,
merging the two images and creating the illusion of 3D.
Later in the 1970s, 3D films were recorded using two camera lenses. The glasses had
lenses of opposite colours, mostly blue and red, to make it possible to see the 3D.
Technology developed and today modern 3D films use polarised light to show 3D.
Now in the cinema the two reels of film are projected through different polarised
filters. Images for the viewers left eye are polarised on a horizontal plane, whereas
images for the right eye are polarised on a vertical plane. The glasses a viewer is
wearing while watching a 3D movie, use the same polarising filters to separate out the
two images again (see figure 1). Each eye sees a slightly different perspective and this
fools the brain into seeing a 3D movie as it was in real life (Phyisics.org, 2010).

Figure 1. Source

However, the images in 3D movies look so real that they mess up the brains ability to
sort out the signals coming in from the senses and trigger a nauseous feeling.
Researchers who study this type of nausea call it cybersickness. Dizziness, headaches
and nausea happen while watching 3D movies because the brain receives conflicting
information from the senses, explains professor Andrea Bubka who researches
cybersickness, in an article from Live Science (Rowan, 2010). When images play out
on-screen, the eyes send signals that tell the brain the body is in motion. Yet inside
the inner part of the ear, where the movement of fluid is used to sense motion and
balance, no change in the bodys position is detected. If the body and ears are giving
the same signals to the brain, it causes cybersickness.
The increasing popularity of 3D movies has raised concern about possible adverse
side effects on viewers. In order to find out how serious it is, researchers had to find
out how many people experience cybersickness while watching a 3D movie. The most
recent and detailed study published in the journal PloS ONE answers this question in

the study: Are there are side effects to watching 3D movies? (Solimini, 2013) In the
experiment 497 healthy adult volunteers were asked to see one 2D movie and one 3D
film during a three week period. They could choose whichever movies they wanted as
long as they did not see the 2D and 3D movie on the same day. Before and after
seeing each movie, participants completed questionnaires about their movie-going
experience, in which they rated their symptoms in three main areas: nausea, vision
problems and dizziness. Close to 55 percent of the viewers of the 3D movie reported
some level of sickness compared to only 14% of those watching a 2D film (see figure
2). Nearly half of the 3D viewers complained that the film hurt their eyes. It strained
their eyes, blurred their vision or made it hard to focus. And slightly more than one in
five 3D viewers felt somewhat disoriented. They had a headache or felt off-balance or
dizzy.

Figure 2. Source

For some people it is harder to handle 3D movies than for others. Solimini, the
researcher of the study previously mentioned, suggests this is due to the fact that the
distance at which the eyes converge, is different from where they focus. This
mismatch causes extra work for the visual system that for some individuals may
result in cybersickness. Professor Martin Banks shares his vision according to an
interview with MIT Technology Review (Grifantini, 2010). Fake 3D causes vergenceaccommodation conflict. Viewers must focus at one distance where light is emitting
from the screen but verge at another distance wherever the 3D object appears to be in
space. This difference in distance in 3D viewing may be the source of headaches and
other discomforts, Bank says. In 3D, the natural linkage between vergence and
accommodation is broken. The vergence-accommodation conflict may be worse on

the small screen. As you go farther away from the screen, the consequences of the
conflict are going to be less, says Banks. Im not worried about the cinema situation
because the distance is long.
Furthermore, Solomini says that the most susceptible people are those with unequal
vision in both eyes or those with small vision misalignments. Most eye doctors agree
with him. Dr. Roger Phelps, an eye doctor in Ojai (Vision Service Plan, 2015) says 3D
can impact each person differently. But in many cases the people who experience
cybersickness have marginal binocular vision. Their ability to use both eyes together
is not ideal. "About 5 percent of the population can't perceive 3D because they're
monocular, which means they only use one eye to see," Phelps explains.
Solimini concludes that it is likely that more people will complain about these
cybersickness symptoms due to the increasing commercial releases of 3D movies.
For those with symptoms a simple optometric visit might be advisable. But those
symptoms are in general not dangerous, because it is only temporary. It can be
slightly disorienting like motion sickness in a car, says Timothy Bennett of Penn State
Hershey Eye Center (Manlove, 2013) but as soon as you stop looking at 3D it should
clear up. According to Bennet, there are not yet known studies on long-term effects
or potential damage on a person's vision. His advice is to limit your use of the 3D
technology, if you are sensitive to cybersickness.
Some advice to enjoy the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 3D, is to simply take
off the 3D glasses for a moment or try to close one eye or the other or both eyes for
thirty seconds. Another technique is to move around in the movie theatre and
changing the perspective on the image. But hopefully as the technology keeps
inventing, theatres will soon be able to eliminate the side effects of 3D movies.

Bibliography

eBooks
1. Zone, R., 2014. Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952 [online].
S.l.: University Press of Kentucky [viewed 3 May 2015]. Available from:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=YsG7AgAAQBAJ&pg=PT281&lpg=PT281&dq=3D+Movies:
+A+History+and+Filmography+of+Stereoscopic+Cinema&source=bl&ots=yGBw8ga_t
W&sig=Eoy4aJIvvCH3l4XKMggZ52rusFI&hl=nl&sa=X&ei=0ytGVbn6IszbaPqhgOgJ&v
ed=0CD4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=3D%20Movies%3A%20A%20History%20and
%20Filmography%20of%20Stereoscopic%20Cinema&f=false

eJournals
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Crossover Observational Study on Visually Induced Motion Sickness. PLoS ONE
[online] 8(2) [viewed 1 May 2015]. Available from:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.005616

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