Actually the reason for eye strain with 3D movies isn't just the fact that you're not focusing infinity (because that would mean that you get eye strain from watching 2D movies as well - the screen has the same distance as with a 3D movie after all). The problem is really that on one hand your eyes are converging onto a point somewhere in 3D space, while they keep focusing at the screen depth (because focusing at any other distance than the movie screen would cause the image to blur) and that's a very unnatural thing for our eyes to do.Endothermic wrote:It's not surprising really since your eye's are basically focused at infinity with the RIFT which is closer to a natural resting focus then having to focus on a screen to watch a movie so your eye's don't work as hard so no strain.
In the real world, when your eyes converge onto an object 1 meter in front of you, they are also focusing 1 meter in front of you (to get a sharp image). With a 3D movie your eyes might converge onto a point that's 1 meter in front of you (because of that "nice" popup effect of something coming out of the screen into your face), while your focus is actually 20 meters in front of you - at the movie screen.
So I guess eye strain can't be totally eliminated with any current stereoscopic tech, not even the Rift.