Unreal Tournament has been modded to treat amblyopia (Image: Epic Games)
It sounds like a teenager's dream: to play shoot-em-up video games, a prescription.
On the American Academy of the annual meeting of Ophthalmology in Orlando, Florida, reported a team led by Somen Ghosh of microsurgical Eye Clinic in Kolkata, India, the video game therapy to improve visual acuity 10 - to 18 - year-olds with amblyopia or "lazy eye ".
This comes hot on the heels of similar findings from a study of adults with the disease, published in PLoS Biology by a team led by Roger Li and Dennis Levi from the University of California, Berkeley. Even more impressive results can be on the horizon, such as video games are combined with another approach, known as "perceptual learning".
Amblyopia occurs when the neural connections from one eye to the brain do not develop normally. Over time, the brain reacts by ignoring the fuzzy input of these "weaker" eye.
The condition can be treated in childhood by patching the good eye and visual exercises for the poor to build neural connections - but dogma until recently was that nothing can happen after about 9 years.
The idea of using video games came from the discovery that expert gamers have unusually strong visual skills. Subsequent studies have shown that action games can improve contrast sensitivity in people with normal vision.
Ghosh studies in children and teenagers with amblyopia who received standard treatment of the patch, glasses and visual exercises, with or without additional treatments. Although the group receiving only the basic treatment showed some improvement after one year - but they were also asked to first-person shooter or racing game to play every day, but noticeably better.
In adults, some of the best results in the treatment of amblyopia are not using the computer, but instead educated people to faint gray patterns known as Gabor patches to distinguish. In 2004 a group led by Uri Polat of Tel Aviv University in Israel that this perceptual learning resulted in twice the improvement in patients' contrast sensitivity.
But even Polat, who recently used a similar approach to the treatment of the natural decline in near vision that occurs with age, admits that the exercises are a little boring for teenagers.
So how about combining perceptual learning with gaming? Now being tested by Levi's lab, in collaboration with a team led by Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester in New York.
Researchers Gabor patches embedded in a modified version of the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament, where they are tested as a treatment for amblyopia.
"You have to shoot at the patches," Bavelier out. "If you do not turn them into nasty robots that are really hard to kill.
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