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Play Tetris To Fix Your Lazy Eye
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."
"Tetris, the falling building block video game.", oh so that's what it's called? Never heard the name before. Not even once.
That's great! Now if only Starcraft could cure the anxiety I feel when being around women...
If I'm reading this correctly, it's performing the same function as corrective lenses - forcing one eye to work harder than the other.
... Prescription or no, I think I still drove everyone crazy with Korobeiniki.
As a child, I wore corrective lenses for almost 10 years, and like most children who wore glasses at a very young age, I had to work hard to make friends.
If a doctor had told my parents that "NO, he HAS to play videogames to fix his eyes", I'm not sure I'd ever have left the house and made other friends
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
As someone who wore that damned patch for years at school and paid the social price of being different because of it, I am really happy to hear this. An hour every evening at home in front of a video game would have been so much better in so many ways. Hopefully people will also be able to avoid that surgery that can leave people just as messed up with the eye going the other way.
You still have 3D / depth perception with a single eye, you just don't have stereoscopic vision.
Seeing as this was only a university study (and not a company project), I'm afraid that they'll publish a few papers, get their citations then move on to other things with only a prototype developed and no plans to sell it (sorry but I'm not a do-it-yourselfer and probably wouldn't want to try putting one together by myself even if the plans/source code were freely available).
So, maybe, could an Oculus Rift developer come up with this or an equivalent program? Even if the rights to Tetris are unavailable, I'm sure a similar game could be devised that would provide the same functionality (less the annoying soundtrack! ;)
Or does the Oculus Rift API only take in a high level 3D scene description and independently render the two, slightly dissimilar viewpoints? I assume not but, if so, perhaps they could be prevailed upon to add some new APIs.
It would be nice to be able to see in 3D. I might actually be able to play some ball sports (ping pong, tennis, football) with some proficiency.
Unfortunately most of the Tetris games available today are of far less quality compared to the original 1988 Tengen Tetris.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Computer games do nothing to cure your lazy butt.
-- Make America hate again!
I played PLENTY of Tetris over the years and it did nothing for my lazy eye (right eye went inwards as child -> corrective surgery -> now goes out). What has worked is a 6 monthly botox injection (free, thank you NHS) into the appropriate eye muscle at Moorfields eye hospital in London. I could still elect for corrective surgery but they try you out with Botox first to see if you are likely to develop double vision, in which case the surgery would then have to be reversed. I understand the treatment was started in the UK by a Moorfields eye doctor some 30 years ago when he smuggled some botox back from San Franscisco..? To be honest I'm surprised more people don't know about this treatment - Russell Howard (UK comedian) bitches about his lazy eye all the time - get yourself down to Moorfields and have a student doctor poke a needle in your eye muscle and stir it round for two minutes.. Lovely stuff! Captcha: Unseen
Based upon the unbelievable number of posters that flock to complain that they can't see 3D every time some subject concerning 3D movies, games or headsets comes up, I predict this topic will have comments all out of proportion to it's nominal interest. I don't know whether people with certain vision defects end up as coders, or if perhaps too much coding amplifies some congenital issue, but I do suspect it is much higher than the 2% cited in the article. I eagerly await the explosion of interest and hope to download the freeware Amblyopia App sometime soon. Get coding.
One of my eyes has a lazier focus than the other. Being a nerd and reading books and screens all day, I noticed from the age of about 17 that my distance vision starts to get a bit fuzzy unless I get outside and look at distant objects, and that this is more pronounced in one eye than the other.
3D films help with the difference between the eyes, because you have to focus both eyes correctly for the effect to work ; it's not like the real world where a slightly fuzzy object seems to be acceptable to your brain, in a 3D film, the fuzziness is really noticeable and your eyes work harder (in my experience).
I also wear reading glasses (+1D) when my distance vision gets fuzzy, not because I need them to read, but because they move the focal point at my monitor distance to what is effectively infinity ; thus solving the problem of having to look at distant objects without cutting into my hacking time.
Two groups of 9 volunteers?
How difficult can it be to get people who are willing to play video games for an hour a day over 2 weeks?
Marty Feldman is smiling from his grave.
From the article I think its not just a matter of playing Tetris - you need to have one eye watching the falling blocks and the other eye watching the blocks at the base of the screen - and I guess they are doing either via a headset or a split monitor display or something - not that clear from the article itself. So there is a little bit more to this than just playing tetris. I suffer from lazy eye myself and I have always been very skeptical on opticians assurances that it can only be corrected in children. Then as a child I was made to wear an eye patch for several years - and it made no difference whatsoever. It seems to me that the opticians / eye doctors were not 100% sure on the way to correct this either and that a lot of pseudoscience was being preached.
And part of that is because The Tetris Company has shown that it wants to make money more than it wants to advance falling blocks as a sport. Otherwise, there wouldn't be successful lawsuits against cloners and claims by cofounder Alexey Pajitnov that distributing software under a free software license destroys the market. I wonder how they got the rights to Tetris to make this experiment. I was hoping the article would have a comment from a representative of The Tetris Company, but I couldn't find anything.
What if you took the "one eye doing this, other eye doing that" idea and applied it to a shooter 3D game, maybe with the player's gun/weapon/body and projectiles assigned to one eye, and the world/environment/etc assigned to the other eye (?) .
With regard to the various discussions of corrective therapy for eyeballs, what about astigmatism? Are there any good ways to correct that defect? I would like to ditch my glasses, and I only have astigmatism (no power correction / sphere correction). I have only tried once to put in contacts and it sucked, but I'm still thinking about trying them.
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