Whoops! Looks like we shouldn’t have funded that university study on the effects of looking at 3DTVs, probably says some guy at Samsung right now. Probably, because the study found that 3DTVs cause eye strain and fatigue, Ars reports.
This is a) unsurprising news, and b) another disturbing instance of commercial interests intermingling with scientific ones. Ideally, the two would be kept, far, far apart, like an angry dog and a feisty cat. The two should never even gaze upon one another! But Samsung dumped some cash into the UC Berkeley study, published in the Journal of Vision, probably hoping they’d be able to parade around a finding like 3DTVS ARE GREAT AND CAUSE NO EYE PROBLEMS AT ALL, but instead, the opposite has happened. Oh Samsung. Please stick to what you are good at, which is making great TVs, and please don’t fund academic research. It’s clearly bad for both parties! [Ars Technica]
Update: A mea culpa is in order: the study was not on the matter of whether or not 3DTVs cause eye strain, but how they do, and how to mitigate the effect. The point about corporate influence on academic research stands, but it should be noted that Samsung was in fact trying to better understand the mechanisms of its displays, not evaluate whether or not they cause eye strain. My apologies for the confusion.
Image: Shutterstock/SerrNovik