3D Health risks

MAY 17, 2010
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For Christos Glaridis at Blu-ray authoring company Eyeframe in London, Thursday was just another day at the studio with several conventional DVD and BD titles in production, a bunch of 3D discs for Sky, destined for the electrical superstores around the UK that already have 3D-ready screens, and several projects under wraps until later this year when we all are expected go 3D mad. Then there’s a text on his phone. “This is crazy,” he says, “A company we’ve never worked with before wants a 3D film trailer transferred to Blu-ray for a screening at the Cannes Festival on Friday!”

The British public has long championed John Logie Baird as a pioneer of television even though nothing of his own invention found its way into the TV system we use today. The popular press, on the other hand, has spent the past 75 years warning us of the dangers that arise from spending long hours in front of a TV screen at times when we could all be reading a newspaper.

Seeing some of the scare stories about 3D TV, even before a regular service has begun, it is easy to imagine we are back in the last century, wondering what 30-line TV might bring and whether or not Baird, a man previously best known for his “chemical socks”, really could make it possible to see things happening many miles away?

In “Here’s Looking At You”, a look at British TV before 1939, Bruce Norman records the laughable misunderstandings that appeared in print as self-publicist Baird announced his developments in mechanical TV.

The Daily Mail, always at the forefront when it comes to welcoming change, wrote in a 1926 editorial of the need for careful regulation of “Noctovision”, a Baird invention that used “invisible rays” to illuminate its subject at night. “Nervous maiden ladies… can no longer rely on being able to go to bed in the dark,” the paper warned.

In 1935, when the BBC shut down the original Baird system transmissions in preparation for the trials of “high definition television”, the Daily Express raised concerns about the dangers to the public that an electronic TV service might present. “Can television see into your home?” the paper asked. “Will television sterilise the population?”

Fortunately for the present generation this didn’t happen, although The Daily Telegraph got closer to the truth when it wrote “The television receiver is not in the least dangerous once the elementary fact is grasped that it must not be tampered with internally.”

TV was not completely free of danger; early cathode ray tubes had a habit of imploding, at which point the internal parts were fired at high speed through the screen. One such event is reported to have killed a visitor to the Berlin broadcasting show, shortly after Adolf Hitler had stopped to admire German television programmes.

Aside from the tendency to obesity that is experienced by some “couch potatoes”, the rumours that TV is bad for your health have proved unfounded – so far. The imminent arrival of stereoscopic TV has given rise to a wave of news items promising headaches, eye-strain and worse for those unwise enough to spend several thousand pounds on a 3D HD TV.

The experiments with 3D films in the 1950s and 1960s did nothing to advance the cause of stereoscopic entertainment. Apart from the fact that they almost irrevocably linked red/green glasses with 3D in the mind of the cinema-going public, the weaving motion of two film prints as they ran through separate projectors helped to produce the “headaches” and “nausea” that are still referred to today.

Now, fast-forward to the second decade of this century and the headaches come from other quarters. In February, the Italian police raided cinemas throughout the country and confiscated 7,000 pairs of Chinese-made 3D glasses said to be a health risk for wearers. Although the grounds for seizure were later reported as a lack of proper CE labelling, a statement from the Italian Ministry of Health claimed that the cinemas were not carrying out “cleaning and disinfection to prevent the glasses from becoming a vehicle for eye and skin infections and infestations of the head.”

Audiences for 3D films don’t seem to have been bugged by the police action, since “Avatar” did as well at the Italian box office as elsewhere. If the European public should abandon the cinema in order to watch 3D TV at home later this year, yet more terrors could lie in store, as health and safety worriers go mad.

In April, the CE giant Samsung issued an ominous message to potential customers for its 3D TVs. “Viewing in 3D may cause disorientation for some viewers,” read a posting on the company’s web site, “Accordingly, do not place your television near open stairwells, cables, balconies, or other objects that can be tripped over, run into, knocked down, broken or fallen over.” Actually, that sounds like good advice for conventional TV receivers as well.

Samsung went on to warn the elderly, children, the sleep-deprived and the hung-over of “Confusion, nausea, convulsions, altered vision, light-headedness, dizziness, and involuntary movements such as eye or muscle twitching and cramps.” Of course, these side effects could arise equally from over-indulgence while watching the big match in 3D at the local pub.

Pregnant women were singled out as likely to fall over after watching 3D programmes and people with epilepsy were told that the left/right flashing of active 3D glasses might trigger an attack. It all sounds very worrying for those nervous maiden ladies who are planning to be first in the queue at Currys when a 3D TV service is launched.

With so many rumours and false starts, it is not surprising that public confusion about 3D abounds. Red/green “anaglyph” movies on DVD with giveaway glasses inside the case did nothing to advance the format. A post on one popular website claimed he would never buy a 3D TV because, “The 3D glasses hurt my eyes and also the movies are always tinted and that is lame, because I love seeing vibrant colour”.

Public demonstrations, such as those from the Panasonic roadshow earlier this year and Sony’s plans for the World Cup, together with the substantial investment that Sky is making to bring stereoscopic TV to the home, will go some way to popularise the format.

The 3D content that will soon air is the culmination of several months of trial and error. Content owners, post-production and authoring houses climb the learning curve every day and they will sometimes slip back. Not everything in 3D will be perfect at the start and some things – where to put subtitles, for example – have yet to be defined. Overall, however, 3D TV is already much better than it was a year ago.

Many of those involved in preparing content for release in Q4 2010 believe that the best of this year’s output will survive until the ultimate vision – moving holographic images without glasses – pops up from our mobile communicator sometime around 2020.

Some years after his ideas were abandoned, John Logie Baird wrote of his experiences, “Oh why didn’t I cash in while the going was good?” Will enthusiasts for what has been called the “cardboard cut-out 3D” of today think along the same lines a few years from now?

And what of the twelve-hour turn-round for that 3D trailer that was optimistically requested from Eyeframe? “The Blu-ray disc was on the first flight out to the South of France the following morning,” said Christos Glaridis.

The technology may be new but, 3D or not, customer service takes priority.