A recent study by Somen Ghosh, a leading ophthalmologist in India, was presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s annual meeting and showed that playing video games improved the visual acuity of 10 to 18 year olds with lazy eye.

Lazy eye, known formally as amblyopia, is a common disorder where a person has a physically normal eye that fails to transmit optic stimulation to the brain for extended periods of time. The disorder affects between 1 and 5 % of the world population, and in most cases only affects one eye.

Typical treatment involves covering the good eye and building up the optic nerves in the other eye through visual training exercises. However, it is widely believed that very little can be done after the age of 9.

In the past, one of the more successful treatments for adults was the Gabor patch, a blurry grey pattern that patients are trained to discern. Though this has been found to be effective on adults, most teenage subjects find the exercise too boring to use as treatment.
This type of treatment has become known as perceptual learning and has also been shown to improve a participant’s contrast sensitivity. This led to the integration of Gabor patches into video games, a process being led by Dennis Levi, a professor at University of California, Berkeley and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester in New York.
Video games were realized as a possibility for treatment after a study showed that expert gamers have unusually strong vision and increased contrast sensitivity. Ghosh’s study showed that when teenagers were playing first person shooters or driving games as therapy they improved at a higher rate than those that just underwent standard treatment.

As of now, Gabor patches have been integrated into the first person shooter Unreal Tournament, where patients have to shoot at Gabor patches, which their brains will naturally discern while playing. This video game based therapy is still in a testing phase, but it seems quite plausible that this modified game can fix some cases of lazy eye.