Ditching the Eye Patch

Some 3% of all children have amblyopia—or “lazy eye”—meaning one eye’s input is processed clearly by the brain, leaving the other out of focus. A traditional treatment is unideal: wearing a patch over the good eye at least a few hours a day for weeks or longer to retrain the weaker eye. Scott Xiao, co-founder and CEO of Luminopia, created an alternative: a virtual reality headset that can display cartoons with different portions of the image shown to each eye that are blurred or eliminated, forcing the brain to better combine the input from both eyes. Children need to use the headset for just one hour a day, six days a week; vision can improve in as little as three months.

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.