When signals between the brain and one eye go awry, input from the other eye can become predominant, a condition called amblyopia or “lazy eye.” Amblyopia is common and it is typically treated by forcing the less dominant eye to adapt, either through lab-based training or wearing an eyepatch. But new research suggests that people may be able to use wearable augmented-reality technology to reduce this visual discrepancy as they go about everyday activities.
When signals between the brain and one eye go awry, input from the other eye can become predominant, a condition called amblyopia or “lazy eye.” Amblyopia is common and it is typically treated by forcing the less dominant eye to adapt, either through lab-based training or wearing an eyepatch. But new research suggests that people may be able to use wearable augmented-reality technology to reduce this visual discrepancy as they go about everyday activities.
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“With this altered-reality system, participants interact with the natural world that is changed through real-time image processing. The system delivers altered but complementary video to each eye in real time, forcing participants to make use of the visual inputs to both eyes cooperatively,” explains lead researcher Min Bao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The altered-reality system can be considered as a special type of the augmented-reality technology, in which some aspects of the scene are altered before the video is delivered to the observer but no unnatural and nonexistent object (e.g. an arrow or a web page) is superimposed.
Read more at Association for Psychological Science
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