Amblyopia Rehabilitation by Games for Low-Cost Virtual Reality Visors

Amblyopia is the partial or complete loss of vision in one eye (called lazy eye). It can be prevented by adequate treatment during the first years of young age. However, the classical therapy of eye patching suffers from a low compliance that can harm the treatment. To increase compliance, we have devised a system based on the combined use of low cost virtual reality visors, like the Google Cardboard, and ad hoc developed games for smartphones. Our system exploits the visor in order to send to the lazy eye an enhanced version of the gaming image while it sends to the normal eye a weakened version of the same image. In this way, the lazy eye must work more than the normal eye. We present here the principles, some issues we encountered, the integration of the games with a service that collects the data, and two games, namely a car racing and a tetris game.