Can gaming help me see in 3D?

At 42, Nic Fleming discovered that he has never really seen in three dimensions. Can new therapies based on video games fix his lazy eye and give him his first glimpse of life in 3D?

m on the back seat of the lower deck of a number 37 bus, outside the red-brick and Portland stone clock tower of Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton, south London. Although I know exactly where I am, I feel lost. I no longer know whether to trust what my eyes are telling me. I’ve just been told by a leading vision scientist that I have no real depth perception. In other words, I have never seen in three dimensions the way most people do.

The lazy eye I’ve had since early childhood means that my brain largely ignores the signals from my right eye, leaving my world flatter than most people’s. Now I’m wondering what the clock tower looks like to my fellow passengers. What can the woman two seats in front see in the son she has on her lap that I can’t see in mine? Which parts of mountain streams, sea birds and other natural sights am I missing out on? And does this explain why my strike rate on the football pitch is so dismal?

I’d met up with Robert Hess from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, during a trip to London to find out about his research using video games to treat lazy eye. Pilot trials suggest the approach could help adults with the condition – an improvement on established treatments, which are mostly considered to be effective only up to the age of about seven. Even more remarkably, some of the participants in Hess’s and related research have provided extraordinary accounts of what it’s like to begin seeing in three dimensions for the first time..

Hess’s group is one of at least five working on the use of video games to treat lazy eye. It’s hoped that the work could soon offer affected children a less onerous form of treatment, as well as potentially reducing the risk of blindness or severe vision loss for adults with the condition.

But more than this, the knowledge generated by this research is helping scientists understand that the human brain is more open to being rewired in later life than was previously believed. The tantalising prospect is of interventions that would make it easier to reverse problems with cognition caused by things like stroke and brain injuries. As the bus pulls away from the stop, I start to wonder if video gaming could fix my lazy eye and give me my first taste of true 3D vision.

Reference:

Modern ideas about lazy eyes and brain plasticity are rooted in the work of neurophysiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who, in 1981, got a Nobel Prize for their work on the basics of how our brains process visual information.
During the mid-1990s, Dennis Levi found that adults with lazy eye could regain a certain form of acuity, or clarity of vision, by repeated practice of specific visual exercises – an approach known as perceptual learning.
A team at the University of Nottingham described their 2003 prototype video-game lazy eye treatment – a wooden tea chest with a hole that allowed patients to see two separate screens – as “virtual reality”.
In 2013 Robert Hess published a pilot study in which 18 adults with lazy eye who played a special version of the classic puzzle game Tetris improved their weak eyes by an average of about two lines on an optician’s test chart.
A recent Nature paper by Dennis Levi and Daphne Bavelier suggests it may be simplistic to think that lazy eye can be fixed simply by preventing the suppression of signals from the weaker eye.
In this TEDx video, neuroscientist Susan Barry explains how she straightened her eyes and began to see in 3D at the age of 48 using vision therapy.
This video gives a taste of what James Blaha’s virtual reality gaming system for lazy eye looks like.
This research paper from 1957, which reports how US scientist Carl Kupfer improved the vision of young adults with lazy eye, shows that evidence of brain plasticity that contradicts modern medical practice goes back a long way.
A video showing how Lazy Eye Shooter, an early version of Dennis Levi and Daphne Bavelier’s video game approach to treating lazy eye, works.
Major video game company Ubisoft announced in March that it had completed development of Dig Rush, a game designed to treat lazy eye based on the research of vision scientist Robert Hess.

Category:	Technology

Attribution

The source of this article:
Nic Fleming. (2015, June 8). Can gaming help me see in 3D? Mosaic Science. https://mosaicscience.com/story/lazy-eye/
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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At 42, Nic Fleming discovered that he has never really seen in three dimensions. Can new therapies based on video games fix his lazy eye and give him his first glimpse of life in 3D?

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