scientific papers on the topic (Score 1)

For those that are interested in the science, here is a post on the topic I wrote in response to a similar query on a human vision research email list.

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From CVNET, 17th March:

Re: CVNet - Sterescopic viewing - a health risk?

About 15 years ago a number of us were thinking about this problem. Eli Peli was very active in the area and I'd direct you to his website to find the papers he published. Also look for papers by Peter Howarth. Mark Mon-Williams, John Wann (plus at the outset, one of Mark's colleagues, Roger Ackerley) and I published a series of articles based upon our work with the displays that were around at the time

Mon-Williams, M, Wann, J.P. & Rushton, S.K. (1993). Binocular Vision in a Virtual World: Visual deficits following the wearing of a head-mounted display. Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics, 13, 387-391.

Rushton S., Mon-Williams, M. and Wann, J. (1994). Binocular vision in a bi-ocular world: new generation head-mounted displays avoid causing visual deficit. Displays, 15, 255-260.

Wann, J.P. Rushton, S.K. & Mon-Williams M. (1995). Natural problems for stereoscopic depth perception in Virtual Environments. Vision Research, 35, 2731-2736.

The first two of the above describe findings with particular displays, the latter is a more theoretical note, eg why you should use parallel axes etc.

Tricia Riddell and I wrote a paper for a special issue of Applied Ergonomics on VR systems where we _speculated_ (note the title of the article) about the potential problems associated with children using stereo displays. I must confess I've not read the paper since it was published (I will have a reprint in a box somewhere..) but I recall we also speculated about the potential benefits as well (compare visual training procedures for convergence insufficiency etc to stereo displays).

Rushton, S.K. & Riddell, P.M. (1999). Developing visual systems and exposure to virtual reality and stereo displays: some concerns and speculations about the demands on accommodation and vergence. Applied Ergonomics, 30, 69-78.

Tricia and John Bullinaria (a computational modeller) followed on doing research based upon modelling and infant data, eg

Riddell, P.M., Bullinaria, J.A. & Rushton, S.K. (1999). Modelling Adaptation in the Human Oculomotor System. In: D. Heinke, G.W. Humphreys & A. Olsen (Eds), Connectionist Models in Cognitive Neuroscience, 206-217. London: Springer.

The human vision people got a bit bored of this stuff after a time, but in the more applied community an interest persisted and I'd suggest looking at the proceedings of the SPIE 3D Displays conference that happens in San Jose every Jan/Feb.

More recently amongst the CV-NETers, Simon Watt in Bangor and Marty Banks' lab have started to look into the broader issue of stereo displays and the role of accommodative cues, visual stress etc. I recall a recent paper from Marty's lab in JoV on this topic. Rob Allison has also been looking at night-vision goggles for the past few years and so he may have some relevant stuff on prolonged use of stereo displays.

There are some basic tricks you can use which should minimise the likelihood of problems with stereo displays, however there is no guarantee that people making stereo movies are aware of these tricks, nor that they would solve every problem - following on from the email from Julie Harris about a certain percentage of people having problems seeing stereo, I think most of us that use stereo displays also know that some people seems more prone to having problems than others (and its easy to speculate why in terms of the state of their binocular vision systems although I'm not sure if anyone has pinned it down to anything like ac/a ratios or anything).

One possibly useful bit of advice - 15 years or so ago we would keep hearing about mythical research that had been done by the US Army or some group and how they had worked everything out. We looked long and hard for this work that would answer all the questions but never found any evidence it existed. If today you hear myths about how some of us that did the earlier work did secret research with commercial companies and "worked it all out", I'd be a little skeptical. Many of us did get involved with the design or evaluation of devices, but at least speaking for myself, when I was at HP, I never "worked it all out".

Another note is that a lot of the work is concerned with stereo HMDs (head-mounted displays). Now stereo HMDs may have the same problems
as stereo cinemas but they may also have more (you move your head with something heavy resting on it, its a display very close to your eye,
it may not be properly aligned, poor optics, low resolution etc), so you have to try to tease these factors apart when reading the research.

Maybe Eli or someone would like to add some more thoughts - or point out what I've missed.

simon