Hacking how we see [video] | Hacker News Reader

Hacking how we see [video]

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144 pointsfebin9 comments

I wonder if it is possible to treat myopia by wearing e.g. +1.0 reading glasses over normal correcting (negative) contact lenses during computer use (i.e. provide a challenge to your eyes so focus mechanism stays in shape).

Good practice, because in not so long you won't have a choice if you want to read the screen.

A lot of people have researched this (http://gettingstronger.org/2010/07/improve-eyesight-and-thro...). I've personally experienced it, slowing reversing my myopia over the course of many years. It took me a decade to develop so it seems fair to me that it also takes a long time to reverse.

Can corroborate. I managed to take my vision from -2.75 to -2.25 over the course of about 9 months of what I would consider to be considerable effort.

Notably, after about 9 months I stopped putting in as much effort though I continued using under-powered lenses. My vision today is -3 (about 5 years after I got it down to -2.25)

Nah, your original myopia was probably just overcorrected (it is easy, overcorrecting myopia in a subjective acuity test results in a smaller and so seemingly darker and sharper percepted image). Your result of ten years of training in probably just onset of presbyopia and a less skewed measurement. And the talk has got nothing to do with myopia reversal training.

https://endmyopia.org/

If you are curious about the idea, EndMyopia is a pretty great resource. A lot of people are fixed in their ideas in how this all works, so they will dismiss it outright. But if you have nagging doubts about vision science, there are some really interesting alternative ideas out there.

Anecdotally, my wife and I have been following the concepts for about a year and a half. We've both reduced our prescriptions by ~1.00 diopter. If nothing else, it helps you to become much more aware of what you are actually seeing and how variable your vision is from moment to moment.

In particular, this prescription calculator is sort of uncanny in how accurate it is https://endmyopia.org/focal-calculator/calc.html

The project's website: https://www.eyeskills.org/

I know a few people with strabismus (and in the last 3 or 4 years started to develop mild strabismus myself, due unequal far-sightedness and a strong astigmatism in my left eye, without wearing glasses at all). Even before I was developing strabismus, I occasionally entertained the idea of using a head's up display, or a tablemount contraption to slowly realign the supressed eye over multiple sessions. I am really amazed to hear now that the realigning can happen in a single session and lasts a (longer than I expected) short while until the brain relapses into the Plan B suppression.

One of the reasons I did not actually try to build this was that I had a hard time imagining participants would be willing to spend large amounts of time over a long period of time to slowly re-align the lazy eye, especially if it's a boring focusing task etc...

I am positively amazed that the re-aligning can happen on such short notice (even if it doesn't last very long) and is relatively robust (I would have guessed blinking the eye after re-alignment would immediately revert to the unaligned state)

The relative brightness trick is brilliant!

Consider daily life glasses with which to attenuate in a controlled fashion the light for the dominant eye. This could be glasses with a fixed polarizer for the supressed eye, and both a fixed and rotatable polarizer for the dominant eye such that relative intensity can be set in the interval [0,1] this is batteryless but may look less appealing. Alternatively hack one of those LCD shutter glasses, and dim the dominant eye (battery powered circuit). Then every day or hour first measure the minimum and maximum relative transparency for fusion, and then set the device at say 4/5 the way between this minimum and maximum, until eventually someday approaching 1.

With such glasses you wouldn't need a game, and the user can use it in part of her daily life (taking a walk, shopping, ...) if the assymetrically transparent eye-patch glasses still look to disturbing for work or whatever...

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