What are /r/Amblyopia's favorite Products & Services?

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If you are looking for something to use at home that is more affordable, I made an app for my son to use and he's been having success with it. I wrote about our family's experience here https://www.reddit.com/r/Amblyopia/comments/6hever/my_son_has_amblyopia_and_how_we_are_managing_it/

And the app is on Google Play. (iOS is in the works): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniansoftware.amblyopia

I have heard from adults as old as 58 who have had positive results using the app. It's mostly free, with some extra features that I've added as a subscription to help out with the development costs, but you don't need to subscribe to use the app.

If you do have a chance to try it out, I'd love to hear about your experience, good or bad.

I'm glad you posted this. I'd say without a doubt that exercise to increase blood flow helps a heckuva lot. My vision has deteriorated so viciously due to COVID and not working out that I just joined this subreddit 30 years after having surgery done on my eye as a child. Surgery was successful, but naturally my vision in the weaker eye has slowly gotten worse as I get older. But in the past few months the decline was so abrupt that for the first time in many years I actually started mildly feeling the effects of what it used to be like. I can just tell it has a lot to do with the deceased blood flow to my brain. My dominant eyes vision is just fine like always. I went from working out 4 times a week to cutting down sharply to zero. Obviously, my priority is to get back in the gym, but I also stumbled on the supplement below. I'm interested in pharmacological remedies and VR as well. Researching VR headsets and looking to purchase one soon.

Forgot the link: Dr. Whitaker's Ocular Pressure & Retina Defense Supplement to Support Healthy Intraocular Pressure Levels, Circulation & Eye Tissue

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009SD8YVM/

My recommendation:

Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HNW68ZC/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_N5DQDbYZA4JJ3

I got the HTC Vive because I also wanted the device for gaming and the Rift was the only other option at the time. However, for Vivid Vision, Oculus Quest seems like the best balance between quality and portability.

Because it is an all-in-one headset, you can put it next to your bed and get in a quick Vivid Vision session when you wake up (you should always put on your glasses or contacts first though). It also boots up quicker with less potential for booting errors. In contrast, whenever I want to play VV, I have to go downstairs where my Vive is along with my expensive computer and towering IR blasters. The Quest also has higher resolution than the lower end options, to the extent that helps with vision therapy. If you want to use it for graphics-intensive gaming, FB recently announced that they will release a Quest-to-PC adapter that leverages the computer’s graphics card.

> The second I try to focus on any of the balls on my brock string, the image (its more of a ghost of an image) in my right eye completely phases out.

So it sounds like the image from your right eye gets suppressed... but what do you see when you aren't focused on a particular ball? Also, the balls on my brock string can move and the string itself is over 6 feet long - have you tried ball positions farther away than your arms can reach?

>In order for me to see the two strings and two sets of balls, I need to relax my eye, but that lets it go lazier. How do I do these exercises if I can't fuse the balls? (everything I see online says "put the balls in a place where you only see one and the string makes an x through it") I can see perfectly fine out of my right eye when I cover my left though (but I can't really read with it... is that weird?), so it's very frustrating - I just want to be able to make one ball that ISN'T JUST MY LEFT EYE'S IMAGE!!!

I have problems with suppression and convergence as well, but for me relaxing and looking "off into the distance" tends to suppress my weak eye. Not wearing my glasses suppresses my weaker eye as well - which makes some of the patching exercises hard. My vision therapist has me doing the brock string exercises with the red/green glasses (kinda like these:https://www.amazon.com/Magenta-green-Movie-Plastic-Anaglyph-Glasses/dp/B006J3JCDS/ ). It makes for some weird color shadings inside the X when the right and left images fuze, but it seems to be helping me. I've also been assigned "pencil pushups" in the past before we started with the brock string... so maybe those would help?

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Check out my post here, just download it through my google drive and scan the qr code

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amblyopia/comments/82tu4h/best_free_vr_amblyopia_app_for_android_apk/?ref=share&ref_source=link

Besides that there really is not any VR amblyopia apps on the playstore, the only one I found is a puzzle game

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kapbismeko.KapbisVRFree&hl=en_US

stereo blocks in the Play Store has a calibration for strabismus:

"Also since many people with lazy eye also have misaligned eyes (strabismus) there is an offset calibration that can be used to compensate for this. Due to the size of the device screen there is a limit to how much of a misalignment the game can correct for."

Basically you apply the offset that fits your degree of eye turn and as you play longer, you align the blocks to fall closer to what normal eye alignment would be.

Its free, all you need are red and blue glasses:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stereopsis.stereoblocks&hl=en_US

BTW this basically works similarly to a Fresnel Prism. Here is a story here for reference:

"In order to maximize this development I do a series of vision therapy exercises that strengthen the connectivity between my brain and my right eye. Every so often, I then lessen the power of that new lens. That lens is called a fresnel prism and it bends rays of light in different directions (in, out, up or down) so as to re-align objects of regard with the most sensitive part of each eye (the fovea) and make single binocular vision possible in the presence of non-aligned strabismic eyes. In short, it adjusts my eye straight, and as you can see in the photo link, I started out with an extremely powerful lens and am now nearing zero. Soon I will not need prisms at all and my eye will be straight on its own."

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kwqwc/iama_a_guy_who_cured_his_lazy_eye_without_surgery/?st=jimji7uh&sh=5af68b72

You can try the app I made for my son. The iOS version just released and will be receiving updates to add more games: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amblyopia-games/id1340307566?mt=8

If you have an Android device, the Android version is more complete at the moment: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniansoftware.amblyopia

I'd be happy to hear your feedback if you give it a try.

You might be interested in Fixing My Gaze, a book by neuroscientist Sue Barry on using vision therapy to gain 3-D vision. It's been at least a year since I've read it, but I remember her discussing how beautiful she found watching snow fall when she could see the space between the flakes.

Barry shares similar experiences in a TED talk. The start of the talk is worth watching for context, but if you want to jump straight to her experience of 3-D vision, it starts at 11:00 minutes.

In the book, she mentions a truck driver who had to quit his job after gaining 3-D vision because he could no longer use his lazy eye to read signs while his dominant eye watched the road. However, I got the impression most people who gain it consider it worthwhile.

In this post, I write about our experience after finding out our son has amblyopia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amblyopia/comments/6hever/my_son_has_amblyopia_and_how_we_are_managing_it/

If you want to try out the app that I made, you can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniansoftware.amblyopia

I made an app for my son. His visual acuity was 20/300 when he was first tested. He had no depth perception because his bad eye was not really being used. He is now at 20/25, and has acquired depth perception.

I have been getting great feedback for my app from parents as well as adults looking for help for themselves. A 53-year-old told me that he can see out of his bad eye for the first time in his life.

If you want to try out the app that I made, you can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miniansoftware.amblyopia

I wrote about my experience with my son's amblyopia here, if you are interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amblyopia/comments/6hever/my_son_has_amblyopia_and_how_we_are_managing_it/