Diplopia: Oculus Rift game designed to treat eye conditions, currently funding on IndieGoGo

Oculus Rift developer James Blaha has taken to crowd-funding site IndieGoGo to raise funds for his VR project Diplopia, which aims to alleviate various eye conditions through visual techniques.

The title has already smashed its $2,000 IndieGoGo target. With 48 days of funding left, the project has amassed $4,465 at the time of writing.

Blaha explained that he looks to use his game to help combat Strabismus, or crossed eye. The condition can lead to diplopia, or double vision, and lazy eye, also known as amblyopia. He adds that 4% of children today suffer from Strabismus.

He writes, "It was long thought that once a person's brain had learned to suppress one of their eyes that they could only unlearn this suppression before a "critical age" of between 8 and 12 years old. Only recently has it been shown that certain kinds of therapies (including video games) can actually treat strabismus past adolescence, allowing for the possibility of restoring 3D vision in adults.

"Diplopia takes advantage of the wealth of new information in scientific studies that have come out in the past couple of years to create an experience that will effectively train people who have a suppressed eye to use that eye in conjunction with their good one. Evidence shows that with a simple well designed game it only takes 1-2 hours a day for 2-3 weeks for a person to get measurable improvements in their vision."

The game looks like this:

It's similar to Breakout in that it sees players smash bricks with a ball. You'll notice that the bricks on one side are white, while the other set is black. This contrast forces the player to use both eyes in tandem to focus on the action, and is said to go some way towards alleviating cross-eye.

What do you make of the project? Let us know below.

Via James Blaha & Polygon.