Your eyeballs will hate 3D films

Ever wondered why it was so troublesome to focus on 3D movies?

3D is the buzzword of the technology industry right now with it being crammed into everything from LCD monitors, glasses that emulate it at a huge performance cost, and even at your local cinemas.

You've probably already seen it used in Beowulf, Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) or the very recent Monsters vs. Aliens - did you notice something odd?

The human eye, of which most of us have two working ones, gives us a 3D view of everything in the world naturally. It can do this thanks to the slightly different perspectives on the same objects, allowing our brain to calculate spatial distance, speed and depth.

The red/blue glasses were a basic way of replicating this effect, causing one eye to see one colour, tricking the brain into thinking there was depth - but it wasn't very convincing, and frequently caused the viewer distress.

Now we use special lenses and fancy digital stereoscopic tech, but is it any better at giving a convincing image? According to Slate Magazine, it isn't.

Here's their explanation of how the 2D image, extended through the glasses to seem to have depth, messes with your eyeballs:

Something different happens when you're viewing three-dimensional motion projected onto a flat surface. When a helicopter flies off the screen in Monsters vs. Aliens, our eyeballs rotate inward to follow it, as they would in the real world. Reflexively, our eyes want to make a corresponding change in shape, to shift their plane of focus. If that happened, though, we'd be focusing our eyes somewhere in front of the screen, and the movie itself (which is, after all, projected on the screen) would go a little blurry. So we end up making one eye movement but not the other; the illusion forces our eyes to converge without accommodating. (In fact, our eye movements seem to oscillate between their natural inclination and the artificial state demanded by the film.)

Will we ever be able to get 3D working without our poor eyeballs feeling the pinch? Or should we just jump straight to pumping the visual data straight in to our optic nerves?

Whichever we choose, it'll be interesting to see what solution we find.