Interesting point, but overall I have to break the news - your wife doesn't see in 3D EVER... 3D vision (i.e. "normal" for most people) requires two receptors, spaced far enough apart to receive different images depending on the distance from the viewer. Whether that's done "in reality" by looking at an object in front of you at a distance, or simulated through 3D glasses, the way your brain combines the two images to produce depth is exactly the same...
Now... perhaps her brain has learned over time to use the fuzzy image produced by one eye to augment her normal vision in the other and give her the ability to discern depth that way. There are also psychological effects - even if you close one eye and look around you, you THINK you're seeing in 3D just because you're so familiar with the surroundings that you know from experience how far away things are, but you're not REALLY seeing 3D.
Try a test - close your eyes, have a friend hold something out in front of you, then open one eye and try to reach up quickly and grab it. Likely you'll miss - at least by a little - unless you're really good at dealing with the experiential clues rather than depending on the actual depth perception.
By the way, you DO bring up a great point - which is the dominant eye effect. Pretty much everyone has one eye that is dominant. You can test this by holding up a finger at arm's length, and with both eyes open adjust it to cover up something - a picture on the wall or something a distance away. Then close each eye and note how the finger appears to move relative to the background. With ONE eye closed, the finger stays pretty much in the same place in relation to the background that it did with both eyes open. With the OTHER eye closed, the position changes. The eye that (when open) shows the finger in the same place is your dominant eye. This is important in certain things - like target shooting, for example.
I wonder how important this is for 3D effects, and if 3D programming is somehow designed for "left eyed" or "right eyed" people in some way?
Why My Wife Needs 3D Glasses to See in 2D
Categories: Televisions 3D Glasses
When I first bought my 3D TV, I (naturally) was excited to enjoy and share the new experience with my family. However, my wife wasn't nearly as excited as I was... for a good reason as it turns out.
Given the amount of money we spent on the TV, glasses, Blu Ray Player, and 3D movies, I was really hoping that she would have a great experience watching 3D shows and movies. Unfortunately, when she put on the glasses her first response was "I don't see any difference". I simply couldn’t believe it, although I can't say I was surprised by her reaction. After all, this is the same person who also can’t really tell the difference between HD and SD television.
With that in mind, I wrote it off as her being her and didn’t really think about it again until several weeks later. I’m not one to read product manuals (no surprise), but as I was cleaning out all of the garbage that came with my 3D TV set up I found the manual for the 3D glasses. I was wondering how to turn them off other than have them shut off automatically and figured I would give a quick read and maybe learn something else about my glasses too. What I discovered opened my eyes (bad pun) to a quirk with 3D and 3D active glasses – they don’t work if you have problems with one of your eyes, and specifically if one eye is much more dominant than the other.
As it turns out, this is the case with my wife's eyes. She can barely see out of one of her eyes – everything is very blurry, even with a contact in. My understanding is that the active technology in the glasses works because they flash on and off something like 60 times per second on each eye. If one eye doesn’t work, it cancels out the effect. This was easy for me to verify simply by watching through my glasses with one eye closed. Basically, what you see is a regular 2D picture.
The good news, if you can call it that, is I figured out why she can’t really see 3D on our 3D TV. The bad news is that she can’t see 3D on our TV. In fact, if she wants to watch TV at all while a 3D show is on, she has to wear the 3D glasses to even get a 2D effect – something that she's not exactly happy about and I can’t really blame her.
Read about Ron's 3DTV show adventures in his Explore3DTV Blog, "The Couch Critic: Last Night in 3D."
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3d experience3d glasses3dtvactive shuttereditorial
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