Gadgetory

I kind of always wondered what I was missing I guess you know how to ask people you know what is what is 3d vision like and that's a really hard question to answer for people who have always had it I saw this TED talk by someone named Susan Barry um and she was one of the first people who was saying that you could actually gain stereo vision in adult at first about two or three weeks in I just saw the keys on my keyboard kind of popping when I got it and it worked so quickly without too much effort that was when I was I thought you know I have to really try to see how far I can push this try to try to figure out what's possible with technology sometimes something associated with strabismus is something called lazy eye or the medical word is amblyopia so a child develops a lazy eye and to treat that lazy eye we patch a child and the patching is to help take the weak eye and make it stronger and give it best vision during the early years of child development I was diagnosed with the lazy eye when I was less than a year old and I've been wearing glasses my whole life I did hundreds of hours of patching when I was a kid and it didn't end up working when I was about nine nine or ten years old my doctor said you know I was passed the critical age I was too old and I would never be able to learn how to use my weak eye together with my strong one basically the brain will often take the shortest route to the best vision so if something's not mesh matching up if it's blurry ER in one eye or if the eye is off-center the brain will just only use the good eye and so what we do is inside virtual reality will take single objects and will increase the signal by increasing the brightness of those odds in the week I and will decrease the signal by decreasing the brightness and the strong eye and that kind of tricks the brain into using the Iowan normally it never would in normal seeing conditions our job as physicians who deal with ophthalmology for business poppies our goal isn't perfect depth perception we work to do so occasionally I'll prescribe if you will video games four times a day call the doctor in two weeks I'm exaggerating a little bit but not by much but any kind of close near work that converges the eyes is strength training for the arms the advantage of fine depth perception is that we drive better replaceable it's better all those fine functions you can do bit you thread a needle better all those fine functions the reason why virtual reality is necessary for this is that we have to show the same object with different properties to each eye and before a virtual reality that wasn't really possible and for a person with lazy eye we we showed this cube to both eyes and we'll make it brighter in the weak eye and dimmer in the strong eye and what that does is it breaks through the suppression of the weak guy that people with lazy I have one of the issues with any new application or treatment is is it truly been scientifically tested as multi-centered double-blind studies will you esta patients with it without it and see the difference and also the thing to be careful about is some devices require FDA approval and presuming this one doesn't may be too much of a presumption maybe no so I've talked to a ton of optometrists vision therapists ophthalmologists we have two optometrists on our Board of Advisors who are actively you know making sure we're doing this the right way advising us on how to build the game our long-term plan is to get this software out to as many people as possible to get we want to help as many people as we can and so that probably means at home and invite over the internet download it use it at home on any head-mounted display the value we can offer to people I think is worth the expense of that amount of this way