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This App Trains You to See Farther
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- joshstrange 13y agoDid you read the article? > Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. Rather, the app works by exploiting recent insights into when and how the adult brain can be fundamentally rewired—a concept known as neuroplasticity.
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- baddox 13y agoBut you can get better at reading by practicing reading. No physical changes to the eye are necessary.
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- tzs 13y ago> Reading is a mental process, whereas vision begins with a physical stimulus Key word here is begins. The input from the eyes is fed to a complicated signal processing system, and vision is the output of that system.
- baddox 13y agoReading is a subset of recognizing objects. Practicing reading makes you better at recognizing written language. This app lets you practice recognizing Gabor stimuli, which makes you better at recognizing a wide range of physical objects.
- benched 13y agoWe're talking about the brain. The brain can change itself from the inside just by willing it. Much more can you change the brain using purposefully designed external stimuli. The brain is like a FPGA, part of which implements a FPGA programmer.
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- maaaats 13y agoHave you heard about the McCollough[1] effect? Check the URL, it's an image you can look at for a few minutes, and it will change the way you process images for several hours. For me it lasted days. And it's all in the brain. http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/ http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/
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- nairteashop 13y agoI think the point others are making is that unlike, say, your height, "vision" is actually a combination of raw input from the eyes, and the subsequent processing of that input by the brain. Therefore vision can be improved by making the eyes better - contact lens, lasik, etc - or by making the brain better - presumably what this app is doing. A (very poor!) analogy would be how you you can use post-processing in software to capture better images, even without changing out the lens or the camera. Upgrading the algorithms in the software will result in better images. Note that I'm pretty skeptical of the claims as well, but I also acknowledge that this falls within the realm of possibility. About to download the app so I can verify for myself...
- ambler0 13y agoThanks for this (I think - I'm still under the effect...)
- pohl 13y agoFascinating. I couldn't get it to work for me. Maybe I didn't gaze long enough at the color images. Or maybe it's my introversion: "One paper found that it is stronger in extroverts than introverts, and might be a reliable test for extroversion."
- logicallee 13y agoTo me it's pretty obvious how it works. It's a somewhat unusual pattern, and your mind is trying to remember where it saw it before and apply some of it. (In point of fact you just saw it a few minutes ago, so that's what you're remembering - it's not a long-term thing.) If you look carefully at the word at the end of this paragraph I can't imagine that you don't see at least some of the appropriate colors faintly in it. Google.
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- maxerickson 13y agoThe article author and also the researcher showed up on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1y9m6w/a_neuroscientist_has_just_developed_an_app_that/ http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1y9m6w/a_neuroscien...
- wherkewitz 13y agoHey that's me. I'm new to Ycombinator but I'll answer questions here too!
- hrkristian 13y agoWelcome! When might we be so lucky as to see an Android or Linux version? or better yet, a platform agnostic web based app?
- 13throwaway 13y agoOpen source javascript clone. https://rawgithub.com/Fordi/eyegame/master/eyes.html https://rawgithub.com/Fordi/eyegame/master/eyes.html
- devindotcom 13y agoHeh, 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.
- kyberias 13y agoThanks! This motivated me to clean my monitor.
- ghayes 13y agoMy screen is too dirty to be able to play. :(
- mkl 13y agoThis 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 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 https://github.com/Fordi/eyegame Also, what's the license?
- eliasmacpherson 13y agowhat are the instructions?
- piyush_soni 13y agoI 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.
- TheSOB888 13y agoEyes feel blurry after playing this game. Uncomfortable. Want to go to bed.
- oakwhiz 13y agoThe 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.0005594.g002.png 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.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Dctjpeg....
- mistercow 13y agoIt'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 13y agoEven more closely related would be a wavelet transform with windowed sine packet wavelets.
- eru 13y agoReminds me of the game Frequon Invaders. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+frequon+invaders https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+frequon+invaders)
- devindotcom 13y agoThis 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 13y agoYep. My time spent playing Delta Force 1 paid off in Tribes. (More so in Tribes 2 - too bad nobody played that one!)
- caw 13y agoThere's another app called "GlassesOff" that seems to do the same thing.
- ericxb 13y agoGlassesOff is used to improve near vision.
- kyberias 13y agoI find it slightly irritating and frustrating that there's a patent pending and there isn't even a demo available.
- MaysonL 13y agoOn 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 13y agoUgh, 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 http://ultimeyesvision.com/purchase.php
- reubenmorais 13y agoThere 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.
- mkl 13y agoYes, 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKbbF66cyqI - short published article on the baseball study: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)00005-0?large_figure=true 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/0960-9822/PIIS0960982214000050.mmc1.pdf http://download.cell.com/current-biology/mmcs/journals/0960-...
- irq 13y agoHere'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 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultimeyes/id805408944?mt=8
- Houshalter 13y agoOff topic but I posted this yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261606 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.)
- cjensen 13y agoIt'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.
- eru 13y agoWhy? Charge as soon as you can make money. Minimum viable product and all that.
- donuon 13y agoNeurobonkers 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-see-farther-or-does-it http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-app-that-trains-you-to-...
- staunch 13y 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/ http://www.quakelive.com/
- cjensen 13y agoYou 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 13y agoA 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.
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- beautybasics 13y agoMisleading title. - It trains to respond fastly
- mistercow 13y agoThe article specifically says that it allowed players to read lines further down on the eye chart.
- piyush_soni 13y agoA 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_neuroscientist_has_just_developed_an_app_that/cfiwf7p http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1y9m6w/a_neuroscien...
- gcanyon 13y agoFor 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.
- eru 13y agoOtherwise, someone else will probably clone it better.
- dorfsmay 13y agoIs this an IOS only apps only? Can't find it on android.
- triberian 13y agoQuestion. Can it be played with lenses on? I found no recommendation for or without!
- alisson 13y agoThis 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 13y agoWhat sort of yoga exercises work for your eyes?
- alisson 13y agoHere's a video of someone teaching them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwXuRIR3Co 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.
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