Towards establishing a new binocular technique for amblyopia treatment using “3D” video games

Abstract

Purpose : Our previous reports (Li et al 2011, 2015) showed that monocular video game play with the amblyopic eye can induce visual recovery in adults with amblyopia. Those findings suggest that video games might have some essential elements for active visual training in improving amblyopic vision when combined with patching. Our current study was aimed at developing a new binocular technique for amblyopia treatment using stereoscopic “3D” video games.

Methods : Eleven adults with non-strabismic amblyopia participated in the study. Crowded visual acuity ranged from 20/25-20/80. In the training phase, the participants were required to play 3D first-person shooter video games for a total of 40 hours, 2 hours per session, over 4-6 weeks. The fellow sound eye was blurred with Bangerter foils. A 32-inch 3D television was used to display stereoscopic game content with a Sony PlayStation 3 system. A pair of liquid crystal shutter glasses enabled stereo images to be delivered to each eye. We measured a range of visual functions in pre-training and post-training sessions. These visual tasks included visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and stereoacuity (Li et al 2016).

Results : After 40 hours of 3D video game play, our participants showed improvement in visual acuity, on average ~1 lines (20%) on a LogMAR letter chart, for both crowded letters and single letters. They demonstrated accompanying enhancements in contrast sensitivity. All participants gained substantial improvements, averaging 34%, in stereoacuity for a range of spatial frequencies (1 to 10 cpd).

Conclusions : Here we show that playing 3D video games for a short period of time can improve spatial acuity, in both two- and three-dimensional domains, in adult amblyopia. Importantly, our findings reveal that stereoscopic video games might have potential therapeutic value in the recovery of reduced stereopsis in visual and possibly other neurological disorders.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.