Soon, no more headaches after watching 3D movies

Researchers have found that certain 3D movies do have headache-provoking scenes which can be improved upon to give viewers a better experience.
According to a 2011 French portal poll which researched how people feel after watching 3D-movies, only one third of spectators had no trouble watching.
Twenty two per cent complained about worsening condition, 7 per cent suffered terrible headache, and the remaining 11 per cent also noticed a worsening state, though due to some other reasons.
Researchers from the Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia believe that almost everyone who watched 3D-movies felt discomfort at least once, and many refuse watching 3D because of that problem they once had.

This headache is a brain's reaction to the 'wrong' images coming to both eyes simultaneously. The brain needs to combine them to produce a stereo effect, but unfortunately it does not always succeed, researchers said.
Most of the time brain accustoms to this 'wrongness' without even noticing it, but, as statistic shows, that does not happen all the time, they said.

Researchers name more than fifteen reasons for that problem. They can be separated into two categories - imperfections of equipment and errors in the movie.
The first kind is explained by a natural desire of the distributors to lessen their expenses, which inevitably leads to a lower quality of the stereo show. Bad glasses, cheap projectors and other tools of improper kind tend to worsen the quality of viewer's experience.

The reasons of the second category are more complicated, diverse, and unfortunately are not always detectable and preventable.
Among them, one of the most painful blunder is reordering of the left and the right views of the 3D video, that may sometimes happen even in the most professional production. And that is far from the only disadvantage of contemporary 3D-movies, researchers said.
They name a creation of 'metrics' - programmes allowing to track such errors, minimising the time of 3D movies technical control.
With the help of these metrics researchers scanned the present Blu-ray productions and compiled statistics of the main problems.

As many as 105 Blu-ray discs were scanned using the metrics, and more than 10,000 potentially problematic scenes were found. In particular, 65 scenes with the left-right view swap were found in 23 different movies.
"That means, that the probability of buying a Blu-ray 3D movie with at least one scene with swapped left and right views is about 21 per cent, which is quite significant for sensitive people," said Dmitry Vatolin from Lomonosov Moscow State University.
Significant decrease in problems may take about 2-3 years more, researchers said.