3D Hurts Your Eyes 244
sajjadG writes "After experimenting on 24 adults, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley has determined that viewing content on a stereo 3D display
hurts your eyes and your brain. This can supposedly cause visual discomfort, fatigue, and headaches According to the article, 3D content viewed over a short distance (like with desktops and smartphones) is more visually uncomfortable when the stereo content is placed in front of the screen. In a movie theater, it's the opposite: Stereo content that is placed behind the screen causes more discomfort than scenes that jump out at you. With the explosion of 3D-capable gadgetry such as televisions and mobile phones, understanding just what this kind of technology is doing to our bodies may help us better use it in the future. The only problem is that technology tends to far outpace research, and until we get a better handle on its effects, we're more or less walking blindly into a 3D world."
Get 2D Glasses (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/miscellaneous/e9b4/
The sample size is sufficient (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the sample size is "statistically valid." You can show a statistically significant result using any sample size; using a smaller sample simply means you need stronger evidence to show the same significance. There are some specious statistics in the paper, but this criticism is plainly false.
The study actually doesn't say that, read it. (Score:5, Informative)
TechCrunch (Along with Ars Techinca and others) got it completely wrong.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/samsung-studies-3d-viewing-discomfort-finds-out-bloggers-dont/
If you read the study, and not the abstract, you'd know they didn't actually watch any 3D. They tested different situations of focusing on various objects to find out WHY some 3D hurts peoples eyes. They did not "find that 3D hurts your eyes" becuase that's not what they were looknig for.
In fact, they discovered the comfortable range for 3D viewing is wider than previously thought.
But you have to actually read the study to know that. - link to the study: http://www.journalofvision.org/content/11/8/11.full
If you hate 3D, hate 3D, but actually read the article before throwing your two cents in.
--Richard Lawler, Engadget
Re:24 people? (Score:5, Informative)
in ui design I learned that people are sufficiently similar that you can test on 7 randomly chosen subject and if your ui work on all of them it will be good for 95% of the population, those 5% be damned. People are not that different inside so unless you are looking for a 1/100000 effect you don't need a big sample, around 30 will be sufficient in most of the case, I don't remember the mathematical proof but it exist.
However if your are doing a research on something with a great variance like food preferences you will need a bigger sample. You can read more about the optimal sample size in those paper : http://www.ime.usp.br/~abe/ICOTS7/Proceedings/PDFs/InvitedPapers/3J3_ALIA.pdf [ime.usp.br] and http://nordbotten.com/articles/OptSampleSize.pdf [nordbotten.com]