Re: Flicker - moderately relevant blast from the Past

The video was for "Everybody Wang Chung Tonight", which consisted of 
two scenes being flipped back and forth at around 10Hz throughout. It 
was a classic 80's video, but got lots of publicity in '87 for the 
epilepsy angle. Unfortunately, there's very little available in hard 
copy online, primarily because it happened before the Web, but the fact 
that there are researchers named Wang and Chung who have co-authored 
papers dealing with epilepsy doesn't help.

A similar, better documented example happened in December of 1997 in 
Japan with an episode of Pokemon. A survey of 4000 children showed .75% 
experienced seizures (and 10.4% experienced other effects such as 
headaches) while watching a certain scene:

http://optics.org/articles/news/05/2/1/1

-
m

On Saturday, February 1, 2003, at 07:01  AM, Charles McCathieNevile 
wrote:

>
> I was watching repeats of Countdown - a music video show that used to 
> run in Australia, from 1987. They commented that a video clip by Wang 
> Chung (a popular group of the time) had been banned by the BBC because 
> of fears that it could spark seizures in people with photo-sensitive 
> epilepsy.
>
> Does anyone know anything more about this (any British people who 
> liked Wang Chung at the time and recall this happening, for example)?
>
> As an historian I have been interested for a while in the histories of 
> what we do and where it came from...
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>
> --
> Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
> Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Saturday, 1 February 2003 16:03:02 UTC