Lemire: Baseball’s new ‘secret weapon’: high-tech vision training

From Joe Lemire at Vocativ on May 9, 2016:

Through the 3-D glasses, the red triangle and blue square just won’t line up. Even when the shapes appear to overlap, the vision training program assures me they did not.  One eye perceives the triangle and the other perceives the square and, despite my best efforts with the keyboard arrows, I can’t find their concentric meeting point.

My visual alignment is deemed “fair,” but the descriptive text sounds clinically severe. My score “represents a moderate binocular eye muscle imbalance. The aiming of the eyes is inaccurate.” Basically, my eyes are misaligned after the target, which will result in perpetually late swings.

The evaluation of my eyes’ convergence—the ability to focus on objects in the foreground—is much worse. The test involves staring at a magic-eye stereogram, which I have never been able to do and can’t do now. The program tells me my eyes’ convergence is “extremely limited.”

There’s no putting rose- (and cyan-) colored glasses on this result: my overall vision score put me in the 5th percentile. I will never be a major league hitter.

Read the full article here: http://www.vocativ.com/316801/baseballs-new-secret-weapon-high-tech-vision-training/



Originally published: May 9, 2016. Last Updated: May 9, 2016.