I Am Stereoblind, But The Oculus Rift Is My Corrective Lens | Hacker News Reader

I Am Stereoblind, But The Oculus Rift Is My Corrective Lens

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103 pointsjayeshsalvi41 comments

Super fun stuff. I have alternating esotropia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esotropia) and also cannot see in stereo in normal life. 3D movies that rely on filters or polarisation also do not work for me. I went to a supercomputing demo of a 3d visualisation company that used occlusion like Rift apparently does, and it worked! It was really mind-bending. They were showing a visualisation of a variable in two dimensions, so they displayed a 3d surface. (I believe this was stuff targeted at the oil/gas industry)

My sensation was that given the size of the thing, it should not all have fit in front of me. That is, given how far away the back was, and how large it looked, the front of it should have been behind my head, but it wasn't. In a later meeting with a visual specialist, we confirmed that this was typical for people who haven't experienced 3d to feel about 3d. We also convinced ourselves that there was no way for me to get that with just corrective lenses.

How fun for this tech to hit the mainstream! For reference, the older tech was based on, I believe, the CAVE stuff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_automatic_virtual_environm...)

It was relatively common in the CAVE to have someone see in stereo for the first time. The shutter glasses have LCDs that are synchronized to flip black and then clear, alternating eyes. The projectors are synchronized to this flip so they show the correct projection for the correct eye. This technique sometimes defeats eye dominance problems that impair stereoscopic vision. Because stereoscopic vision accounts for only about 30% of our ability to judge distance, behind occlusion and motion parallax, it was amusing but not life changing.

That lines up with my experience. The alternating esotropia means that at any time one of my eyes acts as dominant, but it will change based on which direction I look and is also under voluntary control.

I have played ultimate frisbee for years quite successfully, and people were usually surprised when I mentioned I have no depth perception. I've met another A.E. person who was a good softball player. The hard part is when I have to look up at blue sky to catch something; the size difference between "can jump to catch it and cannot" is not very big, and there are no parallax/overlapping cues to draw on.

Interestingly, one friend said "Oh, that explains it" when he learned about my eyes. He noticed that I never look into a cup or glass straight-on when filling it, but instead look at it from the side so I can see how full it is. The growth of the circle of the top-of-liquid is small enough that I will heavily underfill a glass rather than risk spilling. As you suggest, it's not deep life-changing stuff, but it is quite a novelty!

This is exactly the sensation I get with stereo vision. I was told that I'd had a lazy eye from the age of 2 or 3. No one ever gave me details other than that, and I always believed this shifting-dominant-eye effect was a result of the lazy eye. It may be related, but I never found out about the effect by researching lazy eye, aka amblyopia.

How did you come to learn about esotropia? It sounds like the doctor might have actually diagnosed me with that, as I distinctly recall having to wear a patch very early on in life.

Ánd finally, thanks for elucidating on the name of the condition and how you're affected by it. It spot on describes my experience and I'm glad to know a bit more about myself.

The esotropia was diagnosed when I was a kid. In fact, the "visual specialist" I visited as an adult was actually a pediatric doctor, because they're the ones who have the most experience with esotropias. I don't have any memory of being diagnosed with it; it happened when I was 3 or 4, I believe. My left eye is also mildly dominant; if I'm looking straight ahead it will tend to win control. When it was diagnosed, they did an eye surgery to correct the tracking of the off-eye, and they tried to get me to wear glasses to further battle against eye-dominance, though I was a reluctant participant in that experience.

I learned the alternating esotropia name from my parents, probably during high school or so. I don't think I was able to name it before that, and I don't remember the context in which they shared it. Probably I was complaining about the stereograms that were popular at the time; I have never been able to see anything in those.

Aside from what I've mentioned so far, I also get a free bonus of driving my wife a little crazy; she always tries to figure out which of my eyes I'm looking out of when we're talking face-to-face. It's nice to have a bit of novelty that is, all-in-all, not really that big of a deal. It's fun to talk about, though, as evidenced by the popularity of this thread.

If it's just a matter of exaggerating the effect, it should be relatively simple to build low-tech glasses that do the same thing.

The cheapest, easiest proof of concept is to use mirrors and build a small periscope (see the diagram on the left here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Periscop...). Hold the periscope horizontally, and look through it with one eye while keeping the other eye open. This is effectively like moving one eye several inches further away from the other, exaggerating the stereoscopic effect.

A more compact and practical solution could probably be built by using prisms or specially shaped lenses over both eyes, which would halve the necessary distance out from the center of your face. Still a little clunky, probably, but not as much as an Oculus Rift.

That was my thought as well. There are cheap prismatic glasses for reading or watching TV from a prone position. (Search Amazon for [bed prism spectacles].)

Perhaps two pairs of those could be cobbled together for wearable "extreme stereo separation" specs?

Like the author of TFA, I was born with amblyopia, and have a mild strabismus. Unlike in TFA, however, the eye muscle surgery as an infant didn't correct the problem, and my "bad" eye didn't recover or integrate. Instead, I have a massively dominant eye, which has relatively correctable detail vision, and another eye that can do a fair job of tracking contrast and motion, but is utterly useless for detail; even the big "E" on the eye chart is a blur, corrective lenses or not.

Interestingly, the retina of dominant eye has so over-compensated for the imbalance that, the last time I had the blind-spot detection test run, the technician had to repeat the test five times before giving up, saying she just couldn't find my blind spot in that eye. I'm sure I have one, as physiologically, it's not possible not to have one, but it seems to be undetectably small.

I, too, am very interested in the Oculus Rift for trying to address this. I've loosely followed the ongoing research involving using stereo Tetris (the falling pieces are presented to one eye, and the settled pieces to the other) to train the eyes and visual cortex to work together better. It's demonstrated a reasonable level of success, so far.

I had eye muscle surgery when I was younger, and while I enjoyed stereopsis for a brief period afterwards, it soon disappeared. I bought an Oculus DK partly with the thought of trying to code up various eye exercises.

I read somewhere about a Tetris game where the fixed blocks are in one eye and the falling block in another, forcing you to integrate both fields. I really have no idea if this will help, but I think it would be fun to try.

Unfortunately this won't help me, 20/200 corrected in one eye, 20/20 in the other. :( In addition to that, the focal depth of my eyes is just a bit off as well (hah apparently the lens in my blind eye is actually better! Go figure).

Still awaiting optical nerve regeneration tech.

The flip side of this is how bitter (and a bit fearful I am) of 3D tech taking over. I worry that it'll become required for user interface interaction at some point in the future, and that I'll be SOL.

You could use two different eyecups (containing different lenses) for each eye in the Rift. Could work if they happen to provide just the right kind of lens.

Maybe differing focal depth could be dealt with in software? When you use the Rift, your eyes are focused at infinity.

The key problem is that one of my eyes is next to useless. If I close my dominant eye, my other eye (corrected!) can pretty much see that there is an orange bar at the top, some sort of tanish area, some black stuff that is texty, and a white box below it that has texty stuff in it. On the infamous eye exam chart, I can barely make out the top most letter.

One one hand it is sort of nifty, it is almost like a holographic degradation of quality, it'd be more interesting though if it wasn't happening to me!

Oddly enough I found out that the problem I have (underdeveloped optic nerve) often co-occurs with grip strength problems. After an Amazon order and a week of training my grip, my life long problem of dropping things has been resolved. (Cost me $2k for the neuropsych eval to figure this out, but not dropping stuff all the time is a huge confidence booster, so I am A-OK with the trade off!)

Anyway, hopefully nerve regeneration takes off, I'd love to be able to see properly. (Not to mention all the other problems it'd solve for people!)

I was wondering if you could build a welder's helmet where the camera outside the helmet showed you what you were working on and attenutated the bright bead.

http://www.tested.com/tech/443147-1000000-1-contrast-ratio-c...

That is awesome! I love it when I invent cool stuff :-)

I had pretty severe strabismus at birth and also had muscle surgery shortly after. I was born in a developing country and the details of my condition at birth are nebulous, partly out of the ignorance of my guardians, understandably. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the surgery was done to ameliorate some amblyopia, because in North America, the ophthalmologist said wearing eyeglasses were useless that whole time (I'd been wearing them since an infant, basically). After that I had another surgery as a child and again as a teen.

Anyway, I also have what I like to describe as an underdeveloped stereoscopic vision. I can't see 3D movies either. Basically, my condition fits the OP's description.

When I tried out the Nintendo 3DS I also could not see it well, but I moved it at angles and kind of, barely could. However, I had to stop a few minutes later because it was giving me a massive headache (migraine-like).

I'm interested in Oculus Rift. I'll give it a whirl but I'm afraid it will induce that same head pain.

Has anyone with a similar condition experienced headaches in a similar situation?

I wear contacts, and sometimes, if one of my eyes is irritated, I only wear one. It takes about half an hour for my brain to adjust to using only one eye (my vision is bad enough that I essentially cannot use an eye without a contact).

It amazes me that after this happens, I stop noticing the problem. I don't realize that I can't see in 3D up close[1]. Then, I will attempt to do something that requires stereo vision, and I will just fail. I've missed card swipes by about a foot, without being able to tell it was a problem until it happened. I once got a bunch of friends to cover one eye and try to swipe a card, and they had similar experiences, not noticing they were going to fail until the did.

[1] Stereo vision only works within a few feet of your eyes. Further out, you use other cues to construct a 3D model of what you are seeing.

As one who is also stereo blind, this makes me really want to try the Oculus Rift.

I'm stereoblind[1], and had the chance to try out an Oculus Rift a few weeks ago. It's neat, but it's more like a viewmaster or a 3d film than it is "Seeing actual depth." The Rift was pretty cool, even as low-fi as it was. And experiencing simulation sickness, while pretty unpleasant, was also kind of wild. (Stick to simulations that put you in vehicles - avoid Half-Life 2)

Here comes the footnote:

[1] I only really discovered that I was stereoblind in 2006 (age 26), with the release of the album "10,000 Days" by Tool, which comes in stereo-optical packaging. Folks online were raving about the three dimensional artwork packaging, but for me, I had trouble seeing it. Whereas it seems people with normal vision can see the depth right away, it took me minutes of staring through the lenses in the packaging to see the depth of the (admittedly cheesy) artwork and photography.

I spent at least an hour going through that, and when I looked away, I had kind of a Wizard of Oz Color Television moment. I could see depth. Like, holy shit, I can see depth. I remember I just stared at a crumpled plastic bag on the floor.

The effect wore off, although sometimes manifested itself in odd places - particularly in an antique mirror we had kicking around. Looking in the mirror, I could see depth again. When I'm looking at vast expanses - a side-of-the-road scenic view off an Arizona highway - I can muster 'depth' again.

I later heard a report on NPR about how in some cases, depth perception can be re-learned, despite contemporary theories that if you don't learn depth perception by age eight (or so), the neural pathways will never form. In the radio program, the doctor exploring this gave his patients a string lined with beads several inches apart. Tie the string next to your bed, attached to the wall, for example. When you are going to or getting up from bed, pick up that string and hold it taught, and focus for x seconds/minutes on each bead.

Or get a copy of 10,000 Days by Tool and stare at it for an hour or two.

It really blew my mind, seeing actual depth in full clarity that first time. Upon further reflection, it made sense to me that my stereoblindness was why I was terrible at a sport like baseball, but not so bad at soccer, and why with first person shooters, I excelled where others instead got motion sickness. I can see with both eyes, but it's like my brain is using a less efficient algorithm to translate the signals into X/Y/Z. With large, far away things, it's easy. With a small object moving quickly in my direction, not so much.

One of the things to look into are eyes that are grossly disproportionate (like your prescription varies strongly from one eye to the other) When I was young I had a 'wandering eye' which was corrected surgically, but that left me with such a disparity in capability and a diminished depth perception.

Suddenly, I'm very glad that I got into the eye doctor as early as I did; my right eye is dramatically worse than my left, but I guess that I got glasses early enough to prevent something like this from happening.

As a result of a failure to wear proper eye protection (sweating makes it harder to see properly through glasses/goggles, so I neglected to follow SOP) I incurred a traumatic injury to one eye - detached retina + bad patient + lensectomy = blind eye.

At first (7+ years ago) I had trouble walking on uneven terrain, and I still have trouble catching a ball or objects tossed to me. Now I've grown accustomed to my sight impairment, but would welcome a way to see normally again.

I'm wondering if this will help people with similar monocular vision to see with depth perception?

If you only have vision to one eye then unfortunately Oculus Rift will not help.

But believe it or not you still have depth perception using one eye, with depth of field for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception#Monocular_cues

The effect described here seems to help (temporarily, situationally) reactivate the latent depth-perception of people who still have binocular vision. For monocular vision, some other strategy would be necessary... but active systems would seem to make it possible.

Do you get any enjoyment/benefit out of these sort of "wiggle" stereograms:

http://izismile.com/2010/05/07/cool_stereoscopic_animated_gi...

...?

Perhaps alternating-cameras-plus-LCD, or simply vibrating/rotating prism, could give those with monocular vision a depth effect.

(Similarly, some lenses that oscillate focus or depth-of-vision, across a small range, might help accentuate natural depth cues in monocular vision?)

Someone above pointed out that parallax effects contribute a significant amount to perception of depth. I can imagine that someone with monocular vision would be able to use parallax effects, and consequently the wiggle stereograms. Wiggling with a VR headset sounds really difficult... you could actually test it with a normal monitor and a hacked up 3D engine if you were feeling daring.

Thanks for the link. Much appreciated.

While the "wiggle" gifs don't really leap out at me in the way that other 3D images once did, I do see some sense of depth when viewing the wiggle gifs. I'm assuming it's due to the variation in perspective?

I too had pretty bad strabismus when I was born and had an operation to correct it around 3yo, but have never been able to see in 3D, except for 3D movies where the effect is important. I have never been able to see a stereogram for example (and there was a huge fad of them when I was a teenager). As soon as I try to focus beyond the image as I was told many times, my left eye wanders off and nothing happens.

He describes exactly how I see: I see from one eye at a time while the other gives peripheral vision and I can usually switch between them at will. And I just caught myself with the face turned a bit sideways while reading his post, like he's describing as well.

What this thread shows me is that being stereoblind is not uncommon, but I feel that somehow it's not discussed or really considered as a handicap of sorts. Some people don't even know they are until their late twenties! You get tested for color-blindness early and often, as well as just plain vision, but somehow stereovision is either not tested or tested and the answer is often "well there's not much you can do". (granted, a lot of people are unaware they're color-blinded too, despite the tests)

I have always been bad at sports and it's obvious that this has played a role in it, so it leaves me a bit bitter because it was never something that was taken into account into me being bad. I was just bad.

I'm glad I came across this post. I'll definitely checkout http://www.stereosue.com/…

If any is interested, you can buy thin plastic prism to put over your glasses to bend the light to compensate for a lazy eye. Unfortunately they affect the quality of the image so are of limit benefit.

I've only seen 3D three times in my life; parts of Avatar, parts of a 3D demo and once when working on a telerobitcs project a accidentally bumped one of the robots cameras out of position.

Loving every comment here in HN. Maybe we should start a Reddit for 3D vision hacking?

Yes, let's do that! There's so much interesting info here, and I wouldn't like it to stop coming after this leaves the front page. I'm also stereo blind, and it's great to see other people having same experiences and ideas.

Let's start something, reddit, google group, whatever. I think there are plenty of things to share in the future!

The falling ash in Avatar was also first time I saw 3D (at 28). Now I'm considering another surgery to correct my eyes, as I'm convinced the stereoscopic circuitry is all there in my brain, counter to what doctors claim.

Let me know if you start that reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dhacking/

I was thinking about the Oculus for physical therapy type applications just the other week (I have meniere's disease, I get prescribed all manner of vestibular PT involving eye movements). So happy to see that I'm not the only one realizing the potential applications behind gaming for fun that these sorts of interfaces provide!

I've got partial stereoblindness so reading this has me more interested in owning an Oculus Rift than I've ever been. I'm not super interested in augmented reality or VR, but it was pretty surprising to discover that using a 3DS (once you get past the awful low resolution and need to hold it in juuuust the right spot) partially circumvented my problems perceiving depth.

It's neat to hear that the Oculus crew are thinking about how this technology could be used to help people with stereo vision problems, instead of just purely the entertainment uses. Even partial impairment of your stereo vision can have kind of unfortunate consequences - virtually all sports are incredibly frustrating, driving is very stressful, etc.

Interesting. I'm stereoblind as well. I wonder if it would work for me as well. I've had moments during 3d movies where I think i'm seeing 3d, but not sure if it's only due to much larger screen that imax movies are generally shown on. It usually happens on sparks or rain or things that are really flying towards you and i'm wondering if that's similar to what you describe as 'instances where the parallax is very large'.

I may have to get an Oculus rift and try the same demo. It would be really amazing to be able to develop some learning tools for people to retrain the part of the brain responsible for stereovision.

This is fascinating. I have the same issue, althoug not as extensive, and was told that if you haven't seen in stereo by age 4, you never will, because the brain paths died off. I guess this is a proof that it isn't the case.

Can the Oculus Rift driver nudge the screen output? I have an alternating squint, but can use both eyes if I focus on my finger. With screens re-aligned, I'm hoping that I might be able to see in 3D.

This is one of the reasons I read HN every day. So much to learn.

One of my kids has strabismus. He had surgery when he was seven. My wife wanted him to have surgery earlier (2 to 3). It took five years to convince me that the idea made any sense. It didn't. Not to me. As an engineer I saw this as a control problem, not a mechanical problem. Doctors (as in PhD's) at UCLA insisted that these conditions are caused by weak or strong muscled. I called bullshit (as in, to their face). I found them condescending and barbaric in their approach. Kid after kid goes through these bullshit surgeries for no good reason. Well, maybe not, it's easy money as evidenced by the pressure my wife put on me to go along.

At the time I devoted considerable time to building various contraptions to try and see if I could figure out a way to re-train my son to converge his eyes. The most elaborate of these rigs was a goggle with cameras, LCD shutters and 50% mirrors. I could use the LCD shutters to occlude each eye individually from a remote control panel or dim each eye. The 50% mirrors allowed me to use the cameras to watch his eyes and measure position.

With this device in hand I would sit him in front of the TV or Playstation and put on his favorite cartoon or game. I'd sit there and gently try to get him to either switch eyes or encourage him to use both eyes. I could dim the "good" eye to force the other eye to come over and help. Or I could simply occlude it and force a switch. I got some results but I couldn't find much out there to guide me. Nobody wanted to talk to me. As I said, the PhD butchers at UCLA were only interested in surgery. I studied books [0] and articles on the subject and all I got was condescension and a refusal to even approach a discussion. I worked with advanced hardware and software technologies during my day job but somehow was not worthy of their attention. Talk about feeling small.

I finally reached a painful conclusion: The problem with these conditions is that small children (2 to 5+) are incredibly difficult to work with. The concept of having such a small child spend an hour doing very difficult eye work is, well, utopia at best. Therefore, they become victims of a research community that doesn't seem interested in addressing the real problem and, instead, clings to a good sales tool "tight muscles" or "weak muscles" and cuts away.

Through this thread I learned a number of interesting things and now am hopeful to return to some of my ideas, perhaps with a different twist. I also learned of Stereo Sue (http://www.stereosue.com/). Crap, I cried while watching her TedX video. Few things can touch someone more than something that can potentially change your kid's life. Wow.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Models-Oculomotor-Control-George-Hung/...

I created a reddit for this subject: http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dhacking/

John Carmack today tweets: An HMD with one eye covered is a video projector in a dark room.

Is there some happening which prompted this thread and that tweet?

He's likely talking about the Oculus Latency Tester (it covers up one of the eyes), it's unrelated.

Geordi, is that you?

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