Researchers at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan developed a VR game that aims to improve players’ eyesight:
It’s a relatively simple target shooting game developed in Unity for Meta Quest 2. The game features three lanes, each with a circular target on a stick. Pressing down the trigger button on the controller activates a virtual laser beam. Pointing this laser towards a lane highlights the lane and target and puts the player into “aim” mode. But to successfully hit the target, players have to move the controller’s stick in the direction indicated by the small Landolt C (a black ring shape with a gap used in Japanese eye tests) in the middle of the target.
The VR game was designed to give the eye muscles a workout, as players alternate between switching their gaze between targets at different distances and focusing on the Landolt C to see where the gap is. At the end of the game, players were treated to an arcade-style results screen, showing how many hits, misses and combos they got, as well as whether they broke a new record (apparently, some participants got very competitive about high scores).
The results showed that the game was effective in improving the vision of all the participants over the six week study period. For the severely myopic participants in particular, it was found that the more often they played the game, the more their sight improved.
The Landolt C was developed by the Swiss-born ophthalmologist Edmund Landolt:
The Landolt C consists of a ring that has a gap, thus looking similar to the letter C. The gap can be at various positions (usually left, right, bottom, top and the 45° positions in between) and the task of the tested person is to decide on which side the gap is. The size of the C and its gap are reduced until the subject makes a specified rate of errors. The minimum perceivable angle of the gap is taken as measure of the visual acuity. It is generally practised in the laboratory.
The stroke width is 1?5 of the diameter, and the gap width is the same. This is identical to the letter C from a Snellen chart. The Landolt C is the standard optotype for acuity measurement in most European countries. It was standardized, together with measurement procedures, by the German DIN, as DIN 58220 (now EN ISO 8596).
Artificial (that is, by artifice) myopia inducement and elimination is well-known, requiring merely the proper stimulus applied to the eye over a long-enough period of time. The kind of myopia afflicting broad swaths of the population in the current year is clinically known as “lens-induced myopia”, and arbitrarily large-diopter myopias are known to have been fully eliminated over time. Generally, it is possible to shift, positively or negatively, one’s eyesight between one and two diopters per annum.