i wanted to go to bed, but i just can't resist posting something. to all those who think this is ridiculous, you've used s3d for years, blah blah blah... have you come to your conclusions through scientific method and robust clinical trials, or are we just talking opinions of what you "think" is safe for you?
sure, you could read some books or hear a physician tell you "no, s3d cannot hurt you in the long run" - but they would be irresponsible to tell you that. without proper clinical trials and a multivariate analysis spanning a decade, we really wouldn't know the long-term impact of chronic s3d use.
a great example of the importance of hypothesis testing in science and medicine is illustrated by the tragedy and controversy surround thalidomide – introduced to Europe in the 1960s to help combat morning sickness in pregnant women (was also used for a host of other things prior to that, but this one screwed the pooch)… the pill is a miracle drug and prescribed to thousands of pregnant women… all of a sudden, a trend started to appear all over Europe – a rather large number of women who took thalidomide also gave birth to deformed children with a condition called pharcomelia (commonly known as flipper babies) and nearly half of children born with pharcomelia died (a few studies place this figure somewhere between 40 and 50 percent).
Thalidomide was NEVER made available to pregnant mothers in the USA because we [the FDA] would not approve its use without knowing (within reason) the short and long-term effects – clinical data showed unexplainable anomalies between animal and human trials (each should be practically analogous) and there was simply not enough data in the original trials for the European countries to have allowed this therapy to hit the market. So prudence saved the USA from having what, 10k to 100k children born with severe deformities?
I hope you all see the point that without proper clinical trials, nothing that interferes with or alters the physiology of the body can be considered absolutely safe…. And in this increasingly litigious society we live in, can you blame these TV manufacturers for warnings? Sure this example is of a DRUG and S3D is just passive or active glasses plus a video source - but it is still relevant. Ask your ophthalmologist or optometrist what would happen if you had perfect vision and wore -1.5 glasses every day for a year. Or if you have -1.5 power glasses but wear 5.0 for a year. Your vision will be screwed up. for those predisposed to seizures or epilepsy, the fast 120Hz flicker of the display or the shutter glasses could very well throw someone into a tonic-clonic fit.
will s3d harm you if you use it recreationally? probably not. but sitting there for 8 hours at a clip over the course of one, two, three times a week for a year could easily have undesirable effects. this is not meant to be fear mongering or to discredit the posts or thoughts of previous posters, but to inform the public that caution with s3d use is prudent – not because I can show you definitive proof it will hurt you; rather, because there is no clinical data showing the impact of using passive or active shutter glasses over a long period of time (or even a short period).
so we cannot say (within any confidence interval or with statistical significance) that there is data to support the hypothesis that s3d technology is safe in the short or long-term. I cannot sleep now, time to go watch a movie in 3D LOL.
