In stereo 3D, dynamic horizontal image translation (DHIT) is an important technique to mitigate visually stressing depth discontinuities during scene cuts by slowly shifting the stereo 3d views in opposite directions just before and after a scene cut. Thereby, the disparity of objects of interest is adjusted. This kind of scene cut is also known as an “active depth cut”. The DHIT can also be applied to reduce the accommodation vergence conflict, which, today, is the main source for visual fatigue. The perception of DHIT by a human observer is investigated in the course of this work and design recommendations for the DHIT in stereo production or for parameterization of automatic DHIT systems are given. An example for an automatic system is our previously proposed eye tracking based approach “GACS3D”, where the current point of gaze of the subject is brought into the zero parallax setting by applying DHIT. This kind of gaze adaptive processing is supposed to reduce visual fatigue in a single user environment. The effectiveness of this approach as well as the implications for the perception are also investigated in this work. © 2016, Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T).