Is watching 3D movies good for your eyes or bad? I think it might be good, at least it seems to be for me.

Last weekend we took the kids to see Megamind 3D, which was great fun except four year-old Fallon and I both sacked-out for about 15 minutes during the second act, completely missing the death of MetroMan. Fallon had been pretty busy playing in Kung Fu Panda World that day so I can understand why he was tired, but I really had no excuse. Still, even though I saw only 80 instead of all 95 minutes of Megamind 3D, it had a profound physiological effect on me. I think watching the movie in 3D helped my vision. Am I alone in feeling this way?

As a guy with three young sons, I don’t see many movies in theaters, much less 3D movies, and Megamind 3D is the first film I recall having worn the darned 3D glasses for the entire show. And they weren’t the old red-green glasses, either, but new-fangled RealD glasses with circular polarization.

My eyes are terrible — 20/600 with some astigmatism thrown-in just for my left eye. I’ve worn glasses since before I was two years old, which is to say 56 years. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses.

So I sat through the imersive experience of Megamind 3D then afterward, driving home, everything along the road looked like it was in, well, 3D — beautiful.

Maybe sitting for those 80 3D minutes exercised my eyes in a new way, bringing up to par for a time my left eye, which has always been the weaker.

Have I been going through life mainly operating in 2-D? Maybe so.

My father lost an eye in an airplane crash when he was 51 and his depth perception seemed not to change much even though it had to have been based on the simple memory of how far away things appeared to be. It wouldn’t have worked for an infant, maybe, but my Dad had plenty of mental images in his memory bank to make it work.

So am I the only person to experience this effect? A lot of people seem to think 3D is bad for your eyes, not good. What would happen if I went to 3D movies all the time? Would my vision significantly improve?