People afflicted with lazy eye, or amblyopia, can now forego the fashion-backward eye patch and train their eye muscles with video games, according to PsyPost.
When eye patches are employed to strengthen a lazy eye, the dominant eye does no work. With Pac-Man inspired video games, a "push-pull" method forces both eyes to work together as they normally should.
"We know push-pull works. Now it's a question of how much better we can make it work," said Teng Leng Ooi, professor of optometry at The Ohio State University, according to PsyPost. "In tests of these games, we've seen improvements in depth perception and binocular vision in people with lazy eye. The more abnormal the binocular vision is, the higher the number of training sessions needed."
Lazy eye starts in childhood when the eye sends blurry images to the brain, thus never allowing the pathway from eye to brain to develop, according to PsyPost. The disorder affects about 3 percent of the population and can cause problems with depth perception.
Instead of staring at one spot for a length of time, people with lazy eye can focus on getting the video cat to eat video mice, according to PsyPost. The player wears 3-D glasses that stimulate each eye differently. The dominant eye sees horizontal lines while the weak eye sees horizontal lines overlaid with vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines.
"We make sure the weak eye is seeing the contrasting images at all times," Ooi said, according to PsyPost. "The strong eye has stimulation, but it is cortically suppressed. That is pull. The weak eye is pushed to work. And even if an eye is not stable, wherever your eyes are sharing vision, the corresponding retinal points are being stimulated. We think that makes our game design highly effective."
The results are supposed to last up to eight months after training has stopped.
