This App Trains You to See Farther

by brendanlim • 12 years ago

154 61 12 years ago

popularmechanics.com

maxerickson• 12 years ago

The article author and also the researcher showed up on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1y9m6w/a_neuroscien...

wherkewitz• 12 years ago

Hey that's me. I'm new to Ycombinator but I'll answer questions here too!

hrkristian• 12 years ago

Welcome!

When might we be so lucky as to see an Android or Linux version? or better yet, a platform agnostic web based app?

13throwaway• 12 years ago

Open source javascript clone. https://rawgithub.com/Fordi/eyegame/master/eyes.html

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

Heh, nice. Just a little feedback - I can select all purposely or by accident and it highlights the dots. Also, in FF on Win 7, the 'press f11' prompt won't go away. Thanks for the opportunity to get an idea of what this is about, though.

kyberias2• 12 years ago

Thanks! This motivated me to clean my monitor.

ghayes• 12 years ago

My screen is too dirty to be able to play. :(

mkl2• 12 years ago

This is neat. Some issues I spotted: spot-0.png doesn't seem to be a Gabor stimulus pattern (see http://www.cogsci.nl/software/online-gabor-patch-generator), the "press F11" and "Click to begin" messages don't go away (and sometimes going fullscreen is impossible/undesirable anyway).

For people wanting to look at the code it's at https://github.com/Fordi/eyegame

Also, what's the license?

eliasmacpherson• 12 years ago

what are the instructions?

piyush_soni2• 12 years ago

I pressed F11 to go to full screen. The message didn't change. Anyway, I saw a circle pointer and spots on the screen so I started clicking them one by one and they got 'cleaned'. Finally, I removed all the spots that I could see. Nothing happened after that. No message.

ShardPhoenix• 12 years ago

This seems more like a test of mouse movement speed than vision. Probably depends heavily on monitor calibration though.

plaguuuuuu• 12 years ago

that was fast.

I was going to do it myself but ~24 hours later here we are :P

thank you internets!

stangeek• 12 years ago

Thanks for this! The code is a joy to read through, this is really well crafted javascript.

TheSOB888• 12 years ago

Eyes feel blurry after playing this game. Uncomfortable. Want to go to bed.

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

The image that they show reminds me of the way that the 2D discrete cosine transform works.

http://openi.nlm.nih.gov/imgs/512/312/2680596/2680596_pone.0...

It looks similar to this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dctjpeg....

mistercow2• 12 years ago

It's called a "Gabor patch", and it's constructed by multiplying a 1D sine wave by a 2D gaussian window (it's the sine wave that's reminding you of the basis functions of the 2D DCT).

You'll see these all over the place if you read studies about vision. The (highly oversimplified) reason is that if you imagine the edge-detection processes of a mammalian brain as a set of filters, the impulse response of one of those filters would be a Gabor patch.

This is related to why the DCT is so effective for vision applications, although perhaps less significantly than you might imagine just by looking at the patterns.

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

Even more closely related would be a wavelet transform with windowed sine packet wavelets.

eru5• 12 years ago

Reminds me of the game Frequon Invaders. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+frequon+invaders)

babuskov• 12 years ago

DuckDuckGo link that redirects to Google. What's the point?

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

This kind of reminds of playing Tribes in the early days. I was a sniper and would hang out in the mountains, monitoring miles of terrain and waiting for the slightest pixel of movement so I could zoom in to the max and nail it with the laser gun. That game definitely improved my visual responsivity and awareness, if not my actual acuity.

NDizzle• 12 years ago

Yep. My time spent playing Delta Force 1 paid off in Tribes. (More so in Tribes 2 - too bad nobody played that one!)

caw• 12 years ago

There's another app called "GlassesOff" that seems to do the same thing.

ericxb• 12 years ago

GlassesOff is used to improve near vision.

kyberias2• 12 years ago

I find it slightly irritating and frustrating that there's a patent pending and there isn't even a demo available.

MaysonL• 12 years ago

On the app store: 11 5 star, 2 4 star, 5 3 star, 1 2 star, aaaaand 173 1 start ratings. Seems like possibly a server-overload problem.

crazygringo• 12 years ago

Ugh, their website doesn't even explain what platforms it works on. Their home page, about page, and FAQ don't mention it at all.

Their purchase page has mysterious Apple and Windows icons, with a message saying "Is Now Available on the iPad".

But is there a Windows version, which the Windows icon would suggest? Or is it Windows Phone? OSX version? Web version? It says "Available on the App Store", but on my iPhone I can't find it.

And if it's only available for iPad, it doesn't even make sense that the site has a purchase page.

http://ultimeyesvision.com/purchase.php

reubenmorais• 12 years ago

There is an OS X version. I'd assume there is also a Windows and an iPad one. I bought it earlier today and did the first session. It was fun. My eyes felt weird for the first few minutes after finishing the session.

mkl2• 12 years ago

Yes, the website is pretty terrible. An OSX version seems to exist, since they used a Mac Mini in their research. More info I've found:

- video interview with researchers Seitz, Deveau and Ozer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKbbF66cyqI

- short published article on the baseball study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)...

- lots more technical info about the app and the study (supplemental data to above article): http://download.cell.com/current-biology/mmcs/journals/0960-...

irq• 12 years ago

Here's a link to the app on the iOS App Store. Seems to be iPad-only at the moment.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultimeyes/id805408944?mt=8

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Off topic but I posted this yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261606). I didn't think you could repost articles (or at least it hasn't let me do it in the past.)

privong2• 12 years ago

Your submittion and this one link to different URLs (mobile vs non-mobile site), so to the HN system they're different articles.

privong2• 12 years ago

s/submittion/submission/ rough day for me, spelling-wise!

cjensen2• 12 years ago

It's an interesting effect, if it exists.

A researcher charging money for an app based on an effect which he has not finished studying -- no blind study yet -- is a really... odd... thing to do in my opinion. Were it me, I wouldn't charge before the blind study is done.

eru5• 12 years ago

Why? Charge as soon as you can make money. Minimum viable product and all that.

donuon• 12 years ago

Neurobonkers sums it up quite well, "Until I've seen a replication with a randomised, double blind, placebo control group, I for one will be keeping my $5.99 firmly in my wallet."

http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-app-that-trains-you-to-...

staunch4• 12 years ago

"When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball"

Bah! That's not a knife. This is a knife: twitch FPS gaming. Quake Live at 250 FPS, refreshed at 144hz, with < 5ms RTT latency. Reaction times can be compared in almost individual milliseconds. I'll put the reaction times of the best Quake Live player (rapha/cypher/evil, whoever) against the best baseball player any day.

Interestingly, my vision is extremely good. I've often surprised people with how far I can see clearly. So screw this app: learn how to play a twitch FPS well: http://www.quakelive.com/

cjensen2• 12 years ago

You would lose the bet :-)

Keep in mind that the ball is coming straight on, and the batter must discern trajectory (rising, falling) and spin (which affects how the ball curves) and velocity quickly enough that you still have time to move the bat.

For example, a fastball and a changeup both drop at the same rate and spin at the same rate. One is coming at 100mph, the other at 75. Since the ball is heading straight for you, you must perceive speed by measuring how quickly the ball is moving through your eye focus.

Worse, you are expected to bat in an intentional direction. Meaning that you have to hit the ball on an precise spot in the sphere with an intentional amount of force. It's not enough to just swing hard. I'd guess the bat has to be in the right location with a time accuracy of less than a millisecond.

The good batters make good money for a reason.

rschmitty• 12 years ago

A ball that is going to a predetermined area while you stand still...

Hitting a headshot of another player that can go in any direction / velocity while you yourself are traveling in any direction velocity all _before_ that player kills you can be very challenging and depend on very high skill and reaction times

The amount of money a player makes compared to someone in another sport has no bearing.

singlow• 12 years ago

You have both training and selection in both cases. In both cases you have extensive training and in both cases the number of training hours is ridiculous. However, there are negative and positive selection biases for each. Baseball has million dollar contracts as incentive, but also has the negative selection biases associated with the relatively small portion of the world that has baseball training facilities and the added requirements of physical strength that may prevent many with the natural talent from being eligible.

Large salaries are not necessarily enough. If you select the top 100 people in the world for natural talent in reaction times, how many would meet all of the requirements for being a good baseball player?

Baseball players make good money only if they can combine a top 0.01% reaction time with all of the other skills. There may be plenty of people that can top that one aspect but could never compete for those contracts.

babs474• 12 years ago

I have heard, and this article makes the case that reaction time for people is relatively constant, but that the pros are better at anticipating pitches. They read body and shoulder movements leading up to the ball release.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news/20130724/the-spor...

dorfsmay2• 12 years ago

I usually don't like to neatpick, but please say speed when you mean it. Velocity is a vector, it is a speed and a trajectory. Thanks.

gtani• 12 years ago

and oftentimes get TUE (therapeutic use exception) for Ritalin for this reason

http://www.baseballnation.com/2012/6/29/3104332/is-there-an-...

fatrachet• 12 years ago

This app specifically improves clear vision at farther distances, which seems far more useful on a daily basis, especially since a lot of people don't have good vision. Compared to twitch games that only improve reaction time in a very limited practically applicable scope. Considering the small amounts of time investment necessary to get good results, this app seems much more useful than playing quake.

staunch4• 12 years ago

The way the app works seems to me to be a subset of what's required to play Quake well, so if it works I'd bet Quake works better. I also think Quake has other benefits (like reaction time training, spatial awareness, etc, etc) but it could have other downsides too.

beautybasics• 12 years ago

Misleading title. - It trains to respond fastly

mistercow2• 12 years ago

The article specifically says that it allowed players to read lines further down on the eye chart.

piyush_soni2• 12 years ago

A user on reddit quickly came up with a free Web, Android, Windows exe, and a mac app for this. Hackers of this world, I tell you. :)

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1y9m6w/a_neuroscien...

gcanyon• 12 years ago

For anyone wondering about the (bad) ratings in the iOS App Store: I bought this yesterday for an iPad mini.

I think the app must use web-based resources, and their site was slammed yesterday. I could do nothing but give it my name, and then it would go to a black screen and sit there -- no feedback, no activity, for minutes. I was left thinking I had wasted my money.

Today the app loads and runs successfully. The interface is bad. Really bad. Text-overlapping-other-text-and-graphics bad.

The controls are iffy. You're supposed to tap various images but sometimes the taps are off by an inch or more.

Nevertheless, it seemed to do pretty much what it is supposed to. It concluded my first session, congratulated me, and died. I checked and it saved my progress, so there's that.

I'm not totally put out since I got to do the exercises, and it seems plausible that it might help my mediocre vision. I hope the usability, design, and load issues are fixed soon.

eru5• 12 years ago

Otherwise, someone else will probably clone it better.

dorfsmay2• 12 years ago

Is this an IOS only apps only? Can't find it on android.

triberian• 12 years ago

Question. Can it be played with lenses on? I found no recommendation for or without!

alisson2• 12 years ago

This is cool! I being training my eyes using yoga exercises for about 2 months and I can really few the improvements by now. I'll test this app to see if it helps.

Somethings we get in front of a computer too much and your eyes begin to loose the ability to see things farther. It's all about training the muscles.

mhb• 12 years ago

What sort of yoga exercises work for your eyes?

alisson2• 12 years ago

Here's a video of someone teaching them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwXuRIR3Co

At 4m10s she shows the one I'm practicing the most now, training to focus. I like to do it one eye at a time, and then both. I don't aways use the thumb, I like to go to a park and do it between trees, when I'm on a bus I do it between the window's borders (because it's not transparent) and things out side.

Blink is very important to, try to remember to blink, so it's always lubricated enough. I tend to blink less when I'm on a computer, it's something I'm trying to work on.

I'll give it a few more months to see how it reflects on the eye doctor exam.

This App Trains You to See Farther

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