P3D Re: anaglyph glasses and permanent colour shift

["Greg Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Robert Cruickshank <robcruic@xxxxxxxxxxxx>


>John Toeppen mentions someone who's eyes have different colour balance,
>blamed on anaglyph glasses. Many years ago, my friends and I would
catch
>every screening of 3D movies at the local rep cinema (usually Creature
>from the Black Lagoon, in anaglyph). We noticed the temporary shift in
>colour balance caused by the glasses, and joked about it being
permanent


Since anaglyphic glasses are subtractive, I can't imagine how they could
do any permanent harm to the cones of the eyes themselves, since by
definition subtractive filters only diminish the light received by the
retinas, and how could less light do any damage that complete darkness
couldn't do.  However, the neural connections that *process* the
information are another story entirely.  I certainly don't pretend to be
any kind of expert on how the brain processes visual information, but
I've read enough about how adaptive the brain can be to hypothesize that
giving it severely unbalanced inputs for long enough could cause it to
compensate in the opposite direction.  Whether there is any long-term
effect will have to wait for someone to do a study, I suppose.

I've remarked before about the obvious short-term color distortion.  I
didn't find it particularly pleasant once I'd noticed it, but truth be
told, until I'd closed one eye and seen the distinctive color shift, I
hadn't noticed it.  Apparently my brain was compensating for the
differing color balances of the two eyes.  What that means, I can only
speculate...

     -Greg W. (gjw@xxxxxxxxxx)