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."

Comments

The falling building block video game

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tetris, the falling building block video game.", oh so that's what it's called? Never heard the name before. Not even once.

Re:The falling building block video game

[Anonymous Coward]

It is better that one obvious term be explained, than a hundred non-obvious terms go unremarked.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great! Now if only Starcraft could cure the anxiety I feel when being around women...

Re:Great!

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You mean playing as the Queen of Blades hasn't taught you to embrace your feminine side?

So, it's like augmented reality?

[DavidClarkeHR]

If I'm reading this correctly, it's performing the same function as corrective lenses - forcing one eye to work harder than the other.

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 ... Prescription or no, I think I still drove everyone crazy with Korobeiniki.

Re:So, it's like augmented reality?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

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

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.

Any Oculus Rift developers in the house?

[wisebabo]

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.

Re:Any Oculus Rift developers in the house?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Worked on me at 20.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3679275&cid=43534193

Though it takes work on your own to fix it. It's not as if you just get the surgery and the problem is gone, you have to be proactive at making sure you make a habit of looking at objects correctly for quite a while, because if you just retain your old habits then the surgery won't do anything at all.

Unfortunately the surgeons don't emphasize this well enough to most patients, probably because they don't know as they've never had the condition to begin with, so they don't truly understand what it takes to correct the problem (other than stripping out some muscle fibers to allow your brain to re-align your eyes in a normal way - I think they just assume that either your brain works the problem out on its own or it doesn't and the surgery just does nothing.)

You can repeat the surgery multiple times if you want because it isn't exactly destructive. It is very painful for the first 36 or so hours afterwards though. If you are proactive enough though, you should only need it once.

I bet it is more successful at younger ages for the same reason that learning second languages is easier at younger ages: brain plasticity. But still, you can learn to speak new languages fluently even way late in life.

Botox

[Colourspace]

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

Re:3D?

[Jmc23]

No. You really don't. If you're brain has learned to see in '3d' because you grew up with two functioning eyes, then when you cover one eye your brain can use some of the algorithms it's learned to generate '3d'. With one eye you never develop those and you can't see '3d'. It's even hard to distinguish objects, depending on your field of view. With only one functioning eye the world is a painting with wildly changing boundaries that seem to defy logic and roads that always lead upwards.

So glad that's over.