Lazy eye shooter: Making a game therapy for visual recovery in adult amblyopia usable

Abstract

As many as three quarters of a million preschoolers are at risk for amblyopia in the United States, so appropriate screening and accessible treatment are very important. Recent studies have shown that playing action video games results in a range of improved spatial and temporal visual functions, including visual acuity. Lazy Eye Shooter is a game treatment that takes advantage of these findings in that the software contains a dichoptic display in a First Person Shooter (FPS) action video game. FPS games are unfortunately among the most difficult games to learn for naïve subjects. Given that the treatment requires over 40 hours of playtime, we wanted to make sure that subjects were successful at the game from the very beginning. We describe several methods we have used to make the overall experiences of subjects more positive and discuss current preliminary results from the use of Lazy Eye Shooter. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.