Soon, no more headaches after watching 3D movies

Moscow, March 2: You can soon watch your favourite 3D movie without headache or discomfort. A team of Russian researchers has found that apart from bad glasses and cheap projectors, certain 3D movies do have headache-provoking scenes which can be improved upon to give viewers a better experience. A team of scientists led by Dmitry Vatolin, senior research fellow at Lomonosov Moscow State University, investigated the problem of headache provoked by 3D-movies for more than eight years.

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 unfortutely it does not always succeed.

Vatolin’s research team mes more than 15 reasons for that problem. These can be separated into two categories: imperfections of equipment and errors in the movie.

The first kind is explained by a tural 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 unfortutely are not always detectable and preventable.

Among them, one of the most painful (and happily, one of the rarest to be seen) blunder is reordering of the left and the right views of the 3D video, that may sometimes happen even in the most professiol production.

That is far from the only disadvantage of contemporary 3D-movies. As the main achievement of his team, Vatolin mes a creation of “metrics” — programmes allowing to track such errors, minimising the time of 3D movies technical control.

With the help of these metrics the research team scanned the present Blu-ray productions and compiled statistics of the main problems. Nearly 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. Some problems were found even in such top ranking movies as “Avatar”, “The Chronicles of rnia”, “Stalingrad”, etc. “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 percent which is quite significant for sensitive people,’ said Vatolin. (IANS)