For a game that says it will make your eyeballs work better, Ultimeyes isn’t exactly a work of art. It’s a work of science, though, one that presents a series of eye-training challenges in game-like form. After playing it a few times this week, I feel like it might actually work.
Ultimeyes comes from Carrot Neurotechnology, a company that counts former game developers among its number. Adam Goldberg, a former exec. producer from Activision is the CEO and CTO Steve Ganem worked at Neversoft and is now a co-founder and president of SuperVillain Studios. The app — already available for desktop with a mobile version debuting — has players tracking down a series of grey blobs on the screen as they change in location in orientation. A study based on the technology’s brain training principles was done using 19 players from a University of California, Riverside baseball team with each, playing Ultimeyes for 30 25-minute intervals.
The ballplayers later said that they could see see farther by an average of 31 per cent. Some even improved their vision to 20/7.5, so they could essentially see at 20 feet what others could perceive clearly at 7.5 feet. You definitely feel a shift in focus when running through Ultimeyes’ challenges. I found myself looking for and noticing little details better in the various sequences while playing the iPad version. Improvements typically happen after eight weeks but individual results vary, with benefits happening sooner. Like I said above, it’s not going to win any beauty prizes but that’s a small price to pay for something that may let you be able to take in the gorgeousness in the real world a little bit better.
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