Mar 29, 2006
Video games tackle 'lazy eye'
from BBC NEWS
By Gareth Mitchell
Presenter, Digital Planet, BBC World Service
Playing virtual reality computer games may help treat the condition known as amblyopia, or lazy eye, say researchers. In patients with amblyopia, one eye works better than the other. Because the amblyopic eye is inferior for some reason, the brain decides to use the good eye. Over time, the neural connection to the bad eye becomes gradually weaker in favour of the good eye. The traditional way of fixing the problem is for patients to force the bad eye to work harder by wearing a patch over the good eye. The treatment usually involves patching for around 400 hours and can cause the eyes not to work together, resulting in double vision.
"Traditionally VR has been used to present realistic environments in 3D so you imagine you're there because of the depth of the world around you," said Richard Eastgate of the university's Virtual Reality Applications Research Team.
"But we're using VR to make something unrealistic. You could call it virtual unreality," he told Digital Planet...
Read the full story from BBC NEWS
16:30 Posted in Cybertherapy, Serious games | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: serious gaming, cybertherapy
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