For most people with a permanent medical condition there exists a lingering hope that out of the blue, a cure might be discovered. A faint glimmer in the back of the mind that quietly awaits a time to shine. Every malady has it’s day and today is the day for amblyopia.

For those of you who don’t know, amblyopia, aka “Lazy Eye” is a disorder that renders one otherwise perfectly functional eye generally useless. It occurs when the brain stops receiving a full neurological signal from one eye resulting in an extreme dominance of the other. The end result is that one eye ends up being used for normal vision while the other is delegated to “peripheral only” status. Effectively creating a cyclops that can only view the world in two dimensions.

Today researchers announced that playing a specially-designed virtual reality game (headgear and all) can effectively reverse the condition. The game is setup so that the dominant eye is forced to view peripheral aspects of the game (think, “fixed chase cam” or security cameras) while the amblyopic eye is given a first-person perspective. The end result is that the brain is forced to fire up those abandoned visual neurotransmitters…

“Traditionally VR has been used to present realistic environments in 3D so you imagine you’re there because of the depth of the world around you,” said Richard Eastgate of the university’s Virtual Reality Applications Research Team. “But we’re using VR to make something unrealistic. You could call it virtual unreality,” he told Digital Planet.

Now the question remains, “Where do I sign up?”