Air Hockey
Platform:
Oculus Rift
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Tools Used:
Unity, Maya and Photoshop
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Role:
Game Designer + Developer
The start screen image of the game.
The game view.
A screenshot of the therapy mode of the game. In this mouse-based version, the player lines up the visual stimuli (the blue lines) with the other visual stimuli on the puck in order to hit the puck back towards the enemy.
The start screen image of the game.
Overview
Air Hockey is a 3D Oculus Rift Virtual Reality video game designed for NJIT's Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory. It gamifies the principles used in therapy for convergence insufficiency. ​In the game, the player must use their eye position (in the online playable version, their mouse position) to line up the visual stimuli on the mouse with the visual stimuli on the puck. Since the therepeutic objectives limited the nature of the gameplay, the puck can only move back and forth in a straight line (along a patient's "midline axis") however I strove to further gamify the therapy by adding in three levels of difficulty. This game serves as a fun mini-game for patients to enjoy, and differs from the rest of the vision therapy games I designed because it is meant to be able to be picked up and played for a few minutes as opposed to the other games which have involved storylines and detailed objectives.
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Gameplay Video
Detailed Info
Convergence insufficiency is an eye disorder that affects one in twenty people. It affects fifty percent of patients that suffer from traumatic brain injury. The symptoms of this disorder include the inability to do near work for any length of time (reading, writing, or any other activity that requires close up vision). In as little as five minutes, a person with this disorder engaging in one of these activities will see words jumping off of the page and have blurry/double vision of whatever they are focusing on.
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Current therapy for convergence insufficiency is effective but boring and therefore lacks patient compliance. In the case of young children and teens, this vision problem can greatly inhibit school-related tasks like reading and writing, which can significantly impact the education of children and teens in a negative way.
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These VR vision therapy games that I designed are meant to gamify the therapy and make it fun and engaging for patients. The core movement of the therapy is the eyes crunching inward as they maintain focus on an object coming straight towards the patient. That is the reason that each of these games follows a similar structure, as it has to follow the parameters set by vision scientists and other researchers to ensure that it is therapeutically effective in treating this disorder.
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The fuzzy lines seen in the game are Gabor patches, which force the patient to work their eye muscles and prevent involuntary "cheating" by the lenses of their eyes automatically changing size to produce the same convergence movement. Essentially, there are two Gabor patches that the player must line up to hit the puck. One of these patches is where there eye position is (in the case of my web game versions of these projects, this patch is tied to the xy position of the mouse). The other patch is on the puck object. When the player lines these two patches up for a certain amount of time, the puck is hit towards the enemy's goal.
Gabor patch