Two-dimensional entertainment is so 2009.

With Sony’s release of the 3-D upgrade for PlayStation 3, the upcoming 3-D Nintendo DS, at least two 3-D television channels on the horizon, and the box office success of a little flick called Avatar, the consensus is clear: The future of entertainment is 3-D.

But while moviegoers have flocked to recent 3-D offerings, film fans also have had mixed reviews about their experiences, with some reporting headaches, nausea, vision problems and motion sickness. And with 3-D leaping to the small screen, clinical researchers and tech experts want to know whether the special effect might damage eyes in the process.

“The problem with 3-D displays is that unlike the real world, only a subset of the information that normally informs us about the 3-D structure of the world is present,” said Robert Allison, a computer science associate professor at York University who specializes in 3-D vision and technology.

And processing that incomplete visual information does, in fact, impact our eyes.

Marty Banks, an optometry professor at the University of California at Berkeley, found that 3-D displays cause a certain type of eyestrain he terms “3-D fatigue.”