Vision treatment in VR
Introduction
In the age of digital technologies and information abundance, human eyes do not know what rest is: we read, work, communicate and have fun, gazing eagerly at a gadget or a PC screen. Rest, relaxation of the eye muscles, as well as shifting attention, should be an obligatory action of the daily schedule for everyone.
LOOKINAR studio has developed an app to help your eyes relax. It runs in the Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality glasses. It is a set of exercises that will help your eyes relax and eliminate the symptoms of overexertion.
Target Audience
The app is suitable for everyone who keeps care of their health, who spends a lot of time in front of a computer screen and wants to preserve their eyesight. It will be useful for:
• book lovers, electronic gadgets owners, those who spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen;
• people whose professional activity is associated with increased visual workload.
It will be useful for children, because even in elementary school, good teachers interrupt the lesson to do exercises for the eyes. It is also suitable for older people to slightly slow down presbyopia – old age sight, for the prevention of which regular eye exercises are recommended.
Those whose eyes are in close contact with objects can effectively use the app – these are jewelers, nail artists, laboratory assistants and scientists working with a microscope.
How does it work
The user first downloads the app from the Marketplace. He puts on a virtual reality helmet and sees a room, which he cannot move through – he cannot get off the ground. And his task is to keep an eye on the ball, which is at a distance of six meters and constantly changes its position: it moves to the right and left, up and down, approaches and moves away. A person can only move his eyes, since the head should be in one position, motionless.
At the end of one exercise, you can repeat it or move on to the next one, you can speed up or slow down the movement of the ball, or make a pause.
Warning: the app is not a tool for treating eye diseases, it is unlikely that it will be possible to improve vision with its help, but it is quite possible to improve image clarity and focus by increasing blood circulation and the flow of nutrients to the eye through exercise. It is like with a camera: by changing the lens, you do not change the mechanism as a whole, but you get a better and clearer image, and you speed up the focusing.
Features
One eye is closed to the user during exercise. Virtual reality glasses have a display that consists of two lenses – one for each eye. During the exercise, one lens covers the eye and a person does not see anything with this eye. This exercise is very effective, especially for people with strabismus disorders and monocular vision: it helps to correctly build a picture of the environment. The exercise is quite unusual, although it looks like an ophthalmologist’s examination, when one eye is closed with a special device – an occluder.
In virtual reality, there is always possibility for optical illusions, it is possible to change the size of objects – to increase and decrease them. In the last app exercise, before the final three-minute period of darkness, the user sees an optical table: lines with letters that decrease from top to bottom. The user has the ability to zoom in or out the table. But not just bring it closer, but increase it simultaneously with a decrease, contrary to the law of perspective, according to which objects approaching should increase. This experimental solution is spectacular and unexpected for the user.
Project structure
The project consists of 11 parts, starts and ends with a three-minute darkness: the user puts on a virtual reality helmet and plunges into darkness. This is made intentionally, to relax the user. Then go 9 exercises, each consisting of two parts – rotation in one direction and the other, distance change for one eye and for the other.
Difficulties
The most difficult task was to achieve the effect of a closed eye, since the use of two cameras in the exercise made the environment toylike. Therefore, we had to make many attempts and conduct many tests, and the problem was successfully solved.
Project prospects
Our app is an effective and simple help tool for eyestrain that you can provide by simply downloading the app to your gadget. The main advantages are obvious:
• exercises relieve tension from the eye muscles, restore blood circulation, eliminate the “dry eye” symptoms, and you can do it directly in the office, without attracting the colleagues’ attention;
• with the help of the app you remove fatigue – after all, you rest when you are distracted from monotonous work for a while;
• the app helps to relax, prepare for further problem solving, get rid of nervousness, overexertion and discomfort.
With the help of this app, you can not only relax, but also get rid of anxiety symptoms, increase concentration, improve focusing, without ophthalmologist help.
As soon as we receive the test results, the project will develop, the number of exercises will be increased, and they will become more varied – some of them will be universal, and some will be optimized for certain categories of people.
