Games and Gadgets That Improve Eyesight

Last Updated (Thursday, 06 November 2008 11:47) Sunday, 30 March 2008 09:17

Senses - Vision

Playing video games with high levels of action, like Halo and Unreal Tournament, can improve your eyesight, researchers at the University of Rochester have found. 3D Video Games Improve Eyesight Up To 20%. The improvement was remarkable: among a study group of non-gamers that were told to play action video games for a few hours a day, they improved their eyesight by 20 percent within one month.
 

The important factor was the type of gaming you do: Pac Man, Zelda and Mario aren't going to improve your eyesight; searching for fast-moving targets onscreen in a gaming environment with dark and light areas, like in Halo, will. This is because action gaming has a different effect on our brains, Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, said in the study."Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," she said. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."
  

 

To see if there was any improvement, the researchers used test subjects who rarely play video games. The study had one set of players play Tetris and the other set play Unreal Tournament, a shooting game.In comparative eye chart tests, only the players who played Unreal showed visual improvement. The shoot-'em-up players also could correctly identify objects faster than the Tetris players."These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life," Bavelier said in a press release.
 

The research suggests that action gaming can help improve the eyesight of people with visual defects.

The team is now going to research further into how the brain responds to other visual stimuli. They will be using a massive 360-degree enclosed gaming environment for their next study.
 

Nintendo Exercises to Improve Eyesight
   

Available for the portable Nintendo DS system, Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day is designed to improve a user's visual acuity, hand-eye coordination and peripheral vision. According to Nintendo, top baseball and football athletes have long used high-tech visual training programs to sharpen their vision on the field, so why not everyone?
 

Similar to the mega-popular Brain Age titles, Flash Focus attempts to determine your "Eye Age," so that you can play through the exercises in order to lower it. Some of the fun activities include a variation of the hidden ball "hat dance" seen at baseball parks: a circle is placed in one of three boxes, and you must follow its location as the boxes shuffle rapidly on the screen. In another game, you must memorize a letter and then count how many times it appears in a fast-moving stream of letters. A third exercise has you watch two symbols flash on the screen and then you need to tap to indicate whenever they're a match. You get the idea.
 

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