VSP Blog

Today Nintendo held two exciting press conferences in New York and Amsterdam to announce their new Nintendo 3DS hand held gaming system! Boy, have we come a long way since the days of Ms.Pac-Man and Centipede!

While there is much discussion about the new games and features – 3-D without glasses?! Lets take a look at some questions eye doctors have been asked regarding 3-D as it relates to vision.

A few weeks ago, Nintendo posted a warning on its Japanese website that looking at 3-D images for a long time could possibly have a negative impact on the growth of children’s eyes for children under six. Really?

As VSP provider Dr. Nate Bonilla – Warford told the Hollywood Reporter, a large percentage of the U.S. population is unable to view 3-D due to an array of symptoms, similar to motion sickness, that the experts call “vision sickness.” However, generally speaking, 3D is not harmful for your eyes.

Vision sickness? What’s that?

Symptoms include feelings of dizziness, headache, eye strain, motion sickness, stomach ache – while watching images in 3-D or prolonged use of digital devices. If you do experience these symptoms, a trip to the eye doctor is in order as this may signal eye health problems like nearsightedness, farsightedness, amblyopia (lazy eye) or strabismus (misaligned eyes).

Gamers want to know! What’s better for my eyes, playing 3-D games with glasses (stereo) or without (autostereo)?

This is all so new, that we just don’t know! Dr. Nate told Time Magazine’s TechLand blog that “widespread extended 3D viewing is so new, there is very little scientific data to guide us in the difference between stereo and autostereo. One obvious difference is that with autostereo there is no chance that the glasses themselves will irritate the nose or the ears. However, some autostereoscopic techniques usually require a person to keep their head at a very specific location, which can be fatiguing. We do not know if one method or the other is safer for long-term use.” Read more »