Another self tip

Fix with the left eye, get it sharp, and then worry about sharpening the right eye.  Add in some movement to encourage fixing with both eyes.

Remember to be behind the lazy eye

Working with fixation cards

I'd been working with this for the past few weeks to Tuan's suggestion.  It was brutally hard when I was doing it with him on the other end of Skype.  I tried doing it with a prism and could barely get the double images to superimpose even when using a seven diopter prism.

That was about a week and a half ago.  Since we'd spoke I'd got much much better at it.

I noticed a lot how much better I am at it today.

The idea is that you diverge your eyes so that the left eye fovea is on the left side target and the right eye fovea is on the right side target.  When this is happening, you should see three balls (say, three footballs if you're on that line), because you're technically seeing four balls (two per eye, and you have two eyes), but one part left eye pair of balls is on top of one part of the right eye pair of balls.  So the middle ball is a combination of the two, and the other two are seen just once by each eye.  

Sounds a little confusing, right?  Well it is a little confusing, at least at first.  

One thing Dr. Tran mentioned is that when I diverge my eyes and try to fuse the images that it's important to try and get the double images to come in clearly.  Well, that's pretty difficult to do.  But he said something that struck me.  'Try to think about what it takes to make each eye come in clearly and then try and do that for both eyes simultaneously'.  Sort of like singing and playing guitar simultaneously.  Incidentally I never could sing and play guitar at the same time.  But when I thought about it, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to do this.  People override their accommodation reflex all of the time, particularly when they resolve those random dot stereograms (Magic Eye).  This is a direct confrontation with the accommodation reflex.  

The fact that he said that just made me realize that I should be able to do it, and so I started trying, and I'd been doing that for the past one and a half weeks, and I'd made very significant progress in that small amount of time.  

I don't need any prism to get the double images to superimpose (for the bottom football).  As you move up it gets more challenging (requires more divergence), and I've been able to get decent superposition at times with the soccer ball.  I remember early last week it was damn near impossible to get the left eye pair to come in clearly until  around the nine minute mark (I only do 10 minutes--it's a fairly strenuous workout).  But now it takes less and less time for me to get both sets of images to come in clear.  That is to say it is challenging.  And as it gets easier there's a simple way for me to add to the challenge.  Move up to the next set.  When football gets too easy, move to soccer ball.  As that gets easier, move to baseball.

You're supposed to get depth, but I haven't yet had any.  My suspicion is that when I'm able to get both coming in perfectly clearly, I will get depth.  I've gotten a very subtle sensation that I might have seen something that might have been the beginning of depth.   It would make sense because it's only when you're focusing on something with both eyes simultaneously that you can truly seee through both eyes simultaneously.  I imagine it will be an 'oh shit' moment.  

Messing with prisms again

I'd been thinking of ways I can load the Brock String. I busted out some of the old prisms I had bought around four years ago.  I did some exercise with the base in.  This forces my turning in eye to move a bit exo in order to superimpose the double images.  So it's making the muscles go a bit further than normal.  I did that for a few minutes yesterday and then I went back to the normal Brock String exercise thinking that it probably wasn't doing anything.

Suddenly today when I was doing the Brock String I noticed that the closest beads were really close to me, noticeably more than normal.  The thought occurred 'is that because of that one minute I did the other day with the prisms? nahh...'  But then I thought about it a bit more and realized that's probably what it was.  And then I did the rest of the exercise with the prism.

When I finished the Brock String and went back to Windlands in VR, I was sort of surprised by how things looked.  Things had improved quite a lot.   The game had jarred me a bit.  Running around and grapping onto things really gave me a sense of motion.  Things were different from yesterday, noticeably.  That's one of the things that people tell me when I show them my Oculus Rift with a demo like a rollercoaster.  They often mention how amazing the sense of movement is--it really almost feels like they're being thrown around.  Well, I'm starting to get a sense of that.

I guess there are different ways that prisms can be used.  There's sensory fusion, and then there's motor fusion, right?  It seems the typical use is sensory fusion, allowing superimpositioning, and thus, allowing the brain to rebuild on the binocular depth neurons.  And then the eyes align themselves in order to give the brain the information it's being trained to want.

I'm using the prisms the other way.  I'm actually making it harder to superimpose.  I'm making it so that my muscles have to stretch more than usual (exo) in order to superimpose.  I think of this a little bit like taking a bendy material and bending it more than you where you want it to settle, because when you let go, it's going to bend back a little.  I don't want exotropia.  But practicing exotropia might make it more easy for my muscles to maintain a straight gaze since they're so accustomed to esotropia.  Maybe it's necessary to sort of trick my muscles in this way because my muscles were screwed up with the surgeries I'd had when I was a child, who knows.  I'm curious to see what happens later this week.

Brock String and Windlands

Been a while since I'd done an update.

Still been at it, every day.  Usually do about 5-10 minutes of Brock String before I head off to work.
I get home, do some eye stretches, another 10 minutes of Brock String, and then I've been playing a VR game called Windlands.

I'd been doing Vivid Vision for some time, but about a month ago my Oculus Rift stopped working again.  I was able to get it working again by installing the latest runtime and upgrading some drivers.  However, the Vivid Vision software I was using doesn't support the latest runtime.  So I can't use Vivid Vision until it's updated to use the latest runtime.  In the meantime I've been playing that game that I mentioned Windlands.

It's probably the coolest VR game I've yet played.  You run around in a huge open expanse with trees, castles, and canopies.  You have two grapple claws that you can use to grab onto remote objects and pull/whip yourself around to meet objectives.  It's ridiculously liberating.

Uhhh, where am I with vision?  Man, I just looked at my last recorded blog entry and realized how long it's been.  I've made a huge amount of progress in the meantime it seems.  It seems that what I'm doing with the Brock String is really working.  I've been noticing daily changes.  Things are definitely improving, particularly with the Brock String.

I've been changing the exercise quite a bit.  I vacillate between three different things.  I go from normal with the string at my nose jumping my eyes from the closest bead to the farthest.  I do that for a bit.  Then I move the string away from my nose and to my bottom left, left, top left, top right, right, bottom right.  As I have it at each configuration, I do the jumps: close, distance, close, distance.  And sometimes I hop to intermediate beads.  Then the final thing I do move the string around in a circle and I hop around each bead as I do it.  The few areas I have difficulty with the superimpositioning is with the top right and bottom right areas, and generally in the right area.  I can easily get the X on the most intermediate bead.  I can get the X in other places but it's not quite as obvious.  Just today I noticed that I could see the very distant bead pretty well with both eyes.

But I have no doubt in my mind that my vision is improving as a result of this Brock String exercise.  I'm not sure whether the VR stuff helps, but it wouldn't surprise me if that were the case.  Vision these days seems so much easier, so much more natural, and more bold.  The amount of progress I've made in this past month has been substantial.

I'm wondering whether it might be a good time to bust out some anti-suppression solitaire.

Brock, Bubbles, video

12/2/2015	8433
12/3/2015	10027
12/4/2015	9220
12/5/2015	10597
12/6/2015	9899
12/7/2015	8981
12/8/2015	10711
12/9/2015	10510
12/10/2015	10095

Morale is high. The distant bead can be a bit of a bugger.  But getting to it is becoming easier, and I'm noticing significantly lower suppression, particularly on the close-up beads.  Things are becoming more vivid.  The distant bead is getting easier to notice both sides--the distant X.

Brock and Bubbles

11/28/2015	7858
11/29/2015	7992
11/30/2015	8647
12/1/2015	8644
12/2/2015	8433
12/3/2015	10027
12/4/2015	9220
12/5/2015	10597

Things are looking up.  As you can see, I've got my highest score yet just today.  It wasn't long ago that 12000 was my highest score.  But that was when I was doing Bubbles for 30 minutes instead of ten minutes.  

I said earlier that I am able to get the X every time with the Brock String for every bead, although that's a little bit of a simplification.  There is some suppression, which means that it's not always an X,  Sometimes I get a bit of a Y, especially when fixating on the bead in the distance.  But that seems to be getting better.   

I do have a head tilt when doing the Brock String, although that's going down a bit.  Things are getting more comfortable and natural. I'm getting more control when jumping from very close to distance.  Jumping back and forth takes quite a bit of work although it's not fatiguing any longer.  It's weird, it almost seems as though I can feel my lens muscles doing work as I jump to distance.  Also, the drifting of the lazy eye is lessening.  It's becoming much more stable and under my control.  Pasquale suggested that I set up tripod in order to film my eyes as I do the workout to make sure that my eyes are doing the right things.  I'm sure that they're diverging and converging, but it might be a good idea to get a good visual on what's really going on.  

This current stage that I'm in appears to be a long ramp, one in which a huge amount of progress is made.  So I'm happy to stay here and see where it takes me.