Incomplete Gamer

Video gaming has attracted some favourable press over the past couple of years. It seems this often maligned and misunderstood social pastime may have some redeeming qualities after all. And we’re not just talking about games to make you smarter. How about improving your vision, providing relief from pain and even saving your life?

We’ve all heard about the popularity of Nintendo’s brain training games, if not experienced them firsthand. Basically, these games help improve your mental agility, firstly testing you to see how smart you are, and then continually testing you with sets of exercises to monitor you for signs of improvement. I’m not sure how I feel about these types of games. At least when playing a more traditional video game you can blame failure on a bad control system, or an unforgiving AI. Flunk these and you’re basically a dummy.

So how about claims of video games that can improve impaired vision? The boffins from the Virtual Reality Applications Research Team (VRART) at the University of Nottingham, England, have come up with a video game that cures ‘Lazy Eye’.

What is Lazy Eye I hear you ask? It’s not staring at a woman’s cleavage too long, as the name might suggest, but rather, it’s a problem where one eye is stronger than the other, a medical condition known as amblyopia.

One day, DS screenshots may look like this.

Now the traditional cure for this affliction is wearing an eye patch for 400 hours over the course of several months. Naturally enough, twelve weeks dressed as a pirate isn’t all that popular, so the good folks at VRART designed a 3D video game that can perform the same function in only one to three hours and without an eye patch in sight. You won’t be seeing this video game at your local EB’s anytime soon, but you never know; if the innovative designers at Nintendo get wind of the concept then Lazy Eye Avenger may be just around the corner.

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