Playing This VR Game Improves Your Vision

Most games leave your eyes tired and your vision worse. This one does the opposite—and rewards you for coming back.

A research team at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan created a deceptively simple virtual reality game designed to exercise your eye muscles. Over a six-week period, ten participants between the ages of 22 and 36 played the game at regular intervals. By the end of the study, nearly everyone saw measurable improvements in their eyesight—especially those who started with worse vision.

The game runs on Meta Quest 2 and feels like something you’d find in a retro-futurist arcade. Players stand before three lanes, each with a target mounted on a stick. At the center of each target is a tiny Landolt C—a ring with a gap used in Japanese eye exams. To score, players must spot the direction of the gap and move their joystick accordingly. Every successful hit pushes the target farther away, forcing the eyes to constantly shift focus between near and far.

The More You Play This VR Game, the Better Your Vision Gets

That refocusing is the secret. Shifting your gaze between near and far objects stretches the ciliary muscles that control how your eyes focus—muscles that get overworked and stiff from endless scrolling and screen time. The game mimics known vision therapy techniques, and for players with pseudo-myopia (a reversible form of short-sightedness caused by eye strain), the effect was clear: the more they played, the more their vision bounced back.

Players with mild, permanent myopia didn’t benefit quite as much, which tracks. Reversible conditions respond to muscle rehab. Structural ones, not so much.

The game also comes with a scoreboard. Players got arcade-style stats after each session—combos, high scores, hits, and misses—which, somehow, made a vision experiment feel more like Mario Kart. Some got so into chasing records, it turned into an unintentional tournament.

Researchers aren’t calling it a cure-all just yet. The sample size was small, and more testing is on the way. But if the game keeps delivering, it could offer a screen-based solution to a screen-created problem. The same tech that’s frying our eyes might also be what saves them.