The Hidden Pitfalls of 3-D Video Without Glasses

3-D video has a hidden danger looming in front of it. Many readers of this article will blow this off. And you are free to do so, with the forewarning you will experience in the future, multiparty embarrassment.

Centuries ago Homo sapiens with brains were wired to be left-handed were considered a danger to society and harshly dealt with. Not death, excruciating and painful death, typically being burned alive tied to a stake.

Technology is becoming very close to an affordable mass reality of Autostereoscopy. In plain English this means the ability to view a video in a three-dimensional format without the need for lenses (glasses) to separate the recorded scenarios.

In the 1950s projecting a sci-fi/horror film using two projectors where the black-and-white film had one recording tinted red with the other recording tinted green allowed moviegoers to see monsters eating the city in a three-dimensional black-and-white format.

The moviegoer simply needed to put on a pair of glasses where a paper frame containing a tinted version of a relatively new technology of the day held in an inexpensive manufacturing process called: thin-film plastic (tinted food plastic wrap). Certainly you are probably laughing your butt off right now. Please keep in mind we’re discussing technology that is 60+ years old.

File this under “everything is relative”. Seeing a movie in 3-D in its day was a complete WOW! Television, even in black and white was a rare commodity. Movies in color and sound were now the new norm. So of course 3-D entertainment could command a higher dollar.

While Autostereoscopy is not new (3-D video without the need of glasses) all the various technologies have been limited to either a solo viewer or the parties sitting in a narrow angle of view.

This is going to change soon, thanks to technology. And here lies the hidden embarrassment. From a visual viewpoint there is a percentage of the planet that visually speaking is much like being left-handed.

This is not an observable experience. There is a percentage of the planet that was simply not born with binocular (stereo) vision. This group of people does not know what your world looks like. The concept of stereo vision is as alien to them as it is for you to visually train your mind to go see your life in real-time and the past (fourth dimension viewing). I am not speaking of remembering I am talking about the ability to have the past of your life projected to your eyeballs. That is functionally impossible.

Equally, it is functionally impossible for people not born with stereoscopic vision to see in stereo video (or life). They were not born with the ability (unless an eye injury removed the ability).

Feeling sorry for them is as equally stupid as feeling sorry for you that you cannot see the past. How can you miss when you have never known? These people get through life just like you do. They just do it differently. And Autostereoscopy tricks their vision and their mind into seeing 3-D. The results are never good. Their brains are suddenly given data it has never processed before. To a person with normal eyesight this is like you could see the past and present and the future all at once. Your brain is simply not built with the experience to handle that sort of data input.

Let us put a stake in the ground in the search engine world herein now. Autostereoscopy will be a medical issue for people without native 3-D vision. At best it will cause headaches. Borderline cases of epilepsy which suddenly manifests as acute. Lawsuits will begin.

Ah, the unintended consequences of progress.