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.
Tags: 3D, Martin Banks, presbyopia, Sports Video Group, stereographer,
One comment
It’s also true that as you become more experienced in stereoscopy – e.g. learning how to free-view in parallel or cross-eyed – you become essentially immune to the problems of vergence-accommodation mismatch. You get used to it, and you don’t notice it anymore.
By that same argument, I can claim that any _experienced_ stereographer (which you want!), of any age, will not be able to “properly” judge the vergence-accommodation conflict.
I’ve learned that, at least when dealing with cinema sized screens, the mismatch of vergence and accommodation is so minor as to present little problem. In the cinema, even the most extreme depth budgets put the near-point of imagery a couple dozen feet away from the average theater-goer’s eyes, and at that distance, accommodation is already nearly the same as at infinity.
I think vergence-accommodation mismatch may be more of an issue with extreme depth effects on smaller screens, or with the use of stereoscopes.
cheers.
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