Play Tetris To Fix Your Lazy Eye 88
MightyMait writes "A study from a team at McGill University has found Tetris to be a good treatment for lazy eye. 'Armed with a special pair of video goggles they set up an experiment that would make both eyes work as a team. Nine volunteers with amblyopia were asked to wear the goggles for an hour a day over the next two weeks while playing Tetris, the falling building block video game. The goggles allowed one eye to see only the falling objects, while the other eye could see only the blocks that accumulate on the ground in the game. For comparison, another group of nine volunteers with amblyopia wore similar goggles but had their good eye covered, and watched the whole game through only their lazy eye. At the end of the two weeks, the group who used both eyes had more improvement in their vision than the patched group (abstract).' As someone born with crossed-eyes who underwent surgery as an infant and has lived with a lazy eye his whole life (without 3-D vision), the prospect of fixing my vision by playing Tetris is an enticing one."
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So, it's like augmented reality? (Score:5, Interesting)
I cured my own lazy eye, in spite of being told repeatedly that it wasn't possible, and it wasn't through corrective lenses. Video games did play a major role however.
Basically I did my own research about what the cause is (one eye being worse than the other, so the brain learning over time to suppress the double input and only pay attention to the remainder) and what treatments did work for kids. They however said this couldn't be done with older people.
But, I took my own initiative anyways. I used something similar to a patch method where I basically just covered my good eye for a few weeks while watching TV and - you guessed it - video games. This resulted in double vision since I stopped suppressing the partial vision in my worse eye which was corrected with a prism (and my optometrist told me how bad of an idea this was, etc, which later I was told that his advice was wrong.) In addition, during this process I developed the eye in ways it hadn't before (namely, fine motor motion that was previously just ignored.)
After a long period of wearing the prism, I slowly learned how to read with both eyes. Or rather, how one eye leads the other eye - nobody taught me that, I just had to learn it on my own.
Later on down the line I found a competent doctor who said he could treat my double vision, and did so with an excruciatingly painful surgery (morphine couldn't cure my headaches.)
5 years later, I was able to eventually get it so that I would rarely if ever see double, no prism required. Every optometrist I've seen since then tells me that I never had a lazy eye. It's not true though because my medical records up until I was 21 say otherwise, rather they haven't seen anybody who was able to correct it in the way I have.
There's still one issue that I had to correct since then, namely being able to diverge the eyes on demand, which solves a range of other problems (such as not having double vision while laying down.) It was tricky to figure out how to train my brain how to do that, but once I did the results were good. Here's the gist of it:
Go find one of those "magic eye" cards where you try to see a 3d object by diverging your eyes (if you were around in the 90's, you might recall these as those annoying books that people used to faddishly carry around,) only use the simpler ones with more easily recognizable patterns. Something like this would do:
http://www.eyetricks.com/3dstereo83.htm [eyetricks.com]
Try to diverge your eyes so that two of those lizards become one. It is very difficult at first. A good trick is to have this picture displaying on a glossy (or at least somewhat reflective) monitor, and then put a light very far in front of your monitor so that it is behind you. Then position it so that it glares off of the screen, and each instance of that glare you see in your two eyes covers two of those lizards. Then simply focus your vision back and forth from that lightbulb, eventually getting rid of the lightbulb. Eventually you'll want to get to the point where you can cup your hands between your eyes so that your fingers guide each one to the lizards. Go from one lizard apart to two lizards apart, then three, then four.
This should take you about a week to do pretty well. Once that happens, you'll easily be able to master diverging your eyes proper at any angle you look at something.
Use different stereograms if you have to, just make sure they have that distinctive object in them rather than a bunch of small otherwise indistinguishable dots.
Personally, I still am unable to spot the 3d objects in those, but neither can a lot of people with perfect eyesight, so don't sweat it. However they still make good divergence training tools.