Japanese Researchers Create VR Game to Boost Vision

With smartphones, gaming consoles, and computers dominating daily life, excessive screen time is common. This often strains the eyes, as many experience after long hours of gaming or scrolling. Prolonged screen exposure fatigues the ciliary muscles, which help the eyes focus, potentially leading to near-sightedness. Surprisingly, a new solution might involve more gaming.

Researchers at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan have developed a VR game designed to enhance eyesight. While further studies are needed, this game shows promise in helping individuals with myopia improve their vision.

This straightforward target-shooting game, built in Unity for Meta Quest 2, features three lanes, each with a circular target on a stick. Players press the controller’s trigger to activate a virtual laser beam, highlighting a lane and its target to enter “aim” mode. To hit the target, players must move the controller’s stick in the direction indicated by a small Landolt C—a black ring with a gap used in Japanese eye tests—positioned at the target’s center.

The VR game exercises eye muscles by prompting players to shift their gaze between targets at varying distances and focus on the Landolt C to identify its gap. After each session, players see an arcade-style results screen displaying hits, misses, combos, and any new high scores, with some participants showing strong enthusiasm for breaking records.

Over the six-week study, all participants experienced vision improvements. Those with severe myopia saw greater progress the more they played.

As the study involved only 10 participants aged 22-36, larger-scale research is needed to confirm the game’s potential as a treatment for near-sightedness. The Japanese research paper notes that the team plans additional experiments to further assess the game’s effectiveness.