Study: Games can improve vision of adults with lazy eye

Kids with amblyopia, or "lazy eye" as it's commonly known, are familiar with the treatment/ritualistic torture of having a patch put over the good eye and being made to read, in order to strengthen the weaker eye. This doesn't work as well for adults with the condition -- unless they're playing video games while patched.

That's the takeaway from a study by a group at the Helen Willis Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. According to GamePolitics' summary of the study, 40 hours of gameplay using the "bad" eye was equivalent to 120 hours of normal, non-game-specific occlusion therapy. The test patients experienced an average of 30 percent improvement in visual acuity.

Joystiq is not qualified to dispense medical advice, but it sounds like -- if your bad eye is still good enough to figure out what's going on in a video game -- this might be worth trying. Suddenly the impossible dream of being able to kind of see the 3DS's stereoscopic effect seems within reach for the first time.

[Image credit: Magiceye.com. (The image is basically indecipherable for those with amblyopia.)]