3D cinema defies '600 million years of evolution'

3D may be the format of choice in Hollywood at the moment, but an Oscar-winning film editor has hit out at the format calling it unnatural for human eyes.

Walter Murch, who won Oscars for editing Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, has a bone or two to pick with 3D films.

Murch says the way our eyes have to work to watch 3D movies is unnatural; he calls it the "convergence/focus issue", and it's a deal breaker.

Deal breaker

The audience's eyes must focus on the screen, he says – this is a constant, a fact, irrefutable.

He continues, "But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is.

"So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point."

While we do have the ability to do this, it's hard work for our poor little peepers as well as for the area of our brains that deal with perception – resulting in eye strain and headaches.

"This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true 'holographic' images," Murch concludes.

Now there's a challenge for filmmakers if ever we heard one; true holographic cinema, the next big thing.