Diplopia uses Oculus Rift to help treat visual disorders

An upcoming Oculus Rift title called Diplopia will help treat lazy eye and crossed eye, with noticeable improvement expected after 2-3 weeks of gameplay.

Ozzie Mejia

November 26, 2013 12:00 PM

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Oculus Rift VR has previously shown potential for immersive horror, new starship piloting perspectives, and even the chance to perform surgery in new and graphic ways. Now the virtual reality peripheral is aiming to treat real-life diseases with a new game called Diplopia.

Diplopia aims to treat amblyopia (lazy eye) and strabismus (crossed eye) by sending a separate, distorted image to each eye, a treatment that will apply to both child and adult patients. The game itself will task players with destroying blocks in a Breakout-like setting, utilizing the player's brain to integrate in-game images.

"Diplopia takes advantage of the wealth of new information in scientific studies that have come out in the past couple of years to create an experience that will effectively train people who have a suppressed eye to use that eye in conjunction with their good one," said creator James Blaha on the game's Indiegogo page (via Polygon). "Evidence shows that with a simple well designed game it only takes 1-2 hours a day for 2-3 weeks for a person to get measurable improvements in their vision."

As of now, Diplopia has nearly tripled its fundraising goal of $2,000 and is expected to release in February 2014.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?