Nintendo: 3D Has “Potential Impact On the Growth of Children’s Eyes”
Covering all bases or considerate precautionary warning? Either way, this might be worth taking on board if you’re thinking of getting your kid a 3DS when they hit the shelves in a few months’ time.
Nintendo have released a small statement via their Japanese website warning people that the 3D technology implemented in their new console may have an impact on the eyes of children under the age of six. Fox News (along with a rather sensationalised title) offer what appears to be an accurate translation of the warning, which suggests that the 3D functionality available on the console “delivers 3D images with different left and right images, [which] has a potential impact on the growth of children’s eyes.”
Fox News got the opinion of a New York ophthalmologist, Dr. Michael Ehrenhaus, who suggests that Nintendo are being “overly concerned” but explains that children up to the age of eight can develop amblyopia (“lazy eye”) from focusing on something for long periods of time, a condition causing one eye to see better than the other.
While this could all be over-reacting on Nintendo’s part – in the same statement, Google Translate tells me that PIN-operated parental controls will be accessible that will help “avoid the impact of 3D visual images on children” - the warning is still something worth taking note of. The 3DS does includes a depth slider, which will allow the user (or parent of) to turn off the 3D function easily.
News Tags: 3DS, eyesight, fox, lazy eye, visual, warning
Next: The Nukezilla Sunday Supplement – January 2nd 2011
Previous: ESRB Confirm ‘Rayman 3D’ Will Be a 3DS Title
I’m disgusted with Fox News’s titling of this story. Good on Nintendo to have consideration for it’s user base though by way of including parental controls. I’m glad parental controls are being taken more seriously by the big 3.
I have amblyopia and it has nothing to do with the development of the eyes but rather with how the brain learns how to treat 3D images. For a not completely trained brain it could very well be harmful to confuse the brain with the 3D tricks current 3D technology uses. I still doubt the 3DS will cause much harm, but better to built this stuff in now than to be sorry later.
I don’t know a whole lot about the technology, but from what I understand the evidence base for this technology being harmful for developing eyes is pretty slim and this is a case of Nintendo covering themselves rather than something that should be of major concern.
From an uninformed perspective, it seems to me that there is limited harm the 3D technology of the 3Ds even could be doing, potentially. The ’3D trick’ is that the screen is set up such that different eyes recieve very slightly different visual information and by combining the two the brain constructs the combined 3D image.
This is no different to the process that the brain actually goes through in the real world, the only difference is the way the screen is set up to only reveal certain visual information to each eye. although I’m no expert, I’m having trouble seeing how you get from that to harming the eye (except from the intrinsic problem of staring at the same thing for too long which is not unique to the 3DS).
@Peter Silk: There is a big difference in the process. In movies you get two images, that are already focused on specific things, while normally the brain has to learn how to focus both eyes on one thing. That is something the brain can’t do properly from birth and has to learn first. It is also one ability many people lose being drunk.
Seeing seems to be something very natural, but actually it is something that isn’t properly developed until the age of 8.
@ParaParaKing: I know and agree that development of 3D perception is something that develops over time, so perhaps I didn’t make my speculative point clearly.
What I meant was that looking at stuff in reality provides the eye with two different images (by virtue of the seperation of the eyes) which the eyes and brain gradually learn to resolve and interpret as a single 3D image. The 3DS screen is essentially doing exactly the same thing, sending different visual information to each eye that then gets interpreted.
What the point of that is, is that ostensibly it shouldn’t really matter that the DS screen uses an artificial technique to produce these two differing images, it’s still the same type of visual information being sent to the brain to interpret.
Still, you have a point when you say that eye-focusing has a lot to do with how the brain learns to intepret 3D images. I wonder about the mechanisms there. I suppose a good thought experiment would be: if I was born with little screens in front of each eye which somehow display exactly what my eye would be seeing anyway (is that even possible?), would my 3D vision develop normally or would it go wrong when I took the screens away? But I don’t know enough about it to know what the answer would be. I suspect it might go wrong, in which case it’s probably a good idea to do more research into what the effect of the 3DS might be (my hunch is that the long term effect would not be statistically significant).
Whatever the case best practice should be decided by evidence, not mine or anyone else’s speculation about what the effects should be, especially because mine is just idle musings. Someone needs to do science, and in the mean time it probably is sensible for Nintendo to acknowledge that there is an undetermined chance that it could have a negative effect.
/ramble