I started to watch Cloverfield the other day, but after 30 minutes my girlfriend asked me to switch it off. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the opening third of the post-modern monster movie, more that the handheld Blair Witch-style camera work was so jarring that she was suffering from motion sickness. As a gamer I’m used to the first-person perspective of many a shooter, but I have to admit I was rather relieved when we stopped the DVD – my eyes felt like they had been through the wringer just making sense of the constantly moving images. It got me thinking, would I have coped in the cinema? Camcorder footage on a 20-foot-high screen is not a good combination, and even the film’s producer, JJ Abrams, was quoted recently saying that he thought Cloverfield was a rarity in that he think it actually works better on the small screen.There may be some connotations for the future of HD. Will the effects of eyestrain and motion sickness be amplified in HD when Cloverfield hits Blu-ray? With the emergence of stereoscopic (3D) filming, will we find it harder to make sense of images that fool our brains to represent reality more accurately? Maybe it’s down to filming techniques, although static cameras are rare in this age of action blockbusters and CGI. The biggest indicator that our eyes may need to adapt to catch up with technology is the Ultra Definition system currently being developed in Japan – it’s in the experimental stage, but the 450-inch screen can cover a wall and induce motion sickness whatever you’re watching. With any luck, when we’re all watching our home-cinema walls in 20 years’ time, Cloverfield 7 will be less jerky…