How Old Is Your Stereographer?

Speaking at the Sports Video Group Chairman’s Forum in Las Vegas Saturday night, Professor Martin Banks of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – Berkeley raised an interesting issue regarding 3D comfort.  Stereographers (directors of 3D cinematography and videography) are responsible for, among other things, the visual comfort of the audience.  One factor in that comfort is vergence-accommodation conflict, the difference between the focal distance to the screen and the “distance” to which the eyes are pointing.

As people age, unfortunately, they become less able to focus at different distances, a normally occurring condition called “presbyopia.”  And that means that a stereographer with presbyopia can’t properly judge vergence-accommodation conflict.