Eyes Apart: Living with strabismus

New fun video game offers vision training in minutes a day!

Flash Focus: Vision Training in Minutes a Day is a new video game for Nintendo DS. It’s designed to improve hand-eye coordination, focus, and peripheral vision through a series of fun games. Flash Focuswas developed in Japan and is distributed there as well as in Europe, the UK, and Australia as “Sight Training: Enjoy Exercising and Relaxing Your Eyes.”

Created under the supervision of Dr Hisao Ishigaki, a leader in the field of visual training for athletes, Flash Focusmodels vision training programs used by top athletes. It includes a lot of sports related activities like hitting baseballs and running with a football. There are also games like ‘Box Track,’ in which a dot is placed under one of three boxes, with the user having to track where it has moved to.

Users complete daily training activities to challenge Hand-Eye Coordination, Peripheral Vision, Dynamic Visual Acuity, Momentary Vision and Eye Movement, then track their results with a calendar and easy-to-understand charts.

The exceptional thing about this game is that the software checks each individual user’s visual strength and offers a customized training program based on their score. It works like this:

When users first begin, their visual strength in the above five aspects of vision, termed ‘Focus Ability’ in this software, will be checked through a series of exercises and from these results an overall in-game ‘Eye Age score’ is given. When the in-game ‘Eye Age score’ has been calculated, a regular training program is proposed with the aim of creating an overall balance of ‘Focus Ability.’

Recognizing the importance of relaxing the eyes, the game also includes an excellent Eye Relaxation program.

The Touch Generations website offers a thorough explanation of Sight Training, and the Five Aspects of Focus Ability and the Eye Age Check. There is also an excellent Explanatory Video of the game, as well as a video on Relaxing the Eyes, an Interview with Dr Ishigaki, and Screenshots of the game.

Watch trailer on You Tube.

Sight Training as reviewed in The Sun UK newspaper.

Review of Sight Training from Nintendic.