Improve your eyesight with an iPhone app

The atrociously-named Ucansi is readying to release an iPhone app, called Glasses Off, that can reduce the “eye age” of an older person by 20% and increase the reading speed of small, newspaper- and book-si ed text by more than 50%.

The app works by counteracting the effects of presbyopia, a condition that limits an eye’s ability to focus on near objects, like the pages of a book… or a smartphone. Presbyopia is the reason that older people have reading glasses, and why 40- and 50-year-olds, at the height of their geriatric denial, hold books and restaurant menus at arm’s length. Basically, without reading glasses, everything nearer than your minimum focusing distance is a blur — and GlassesOff trains your brain to recogni e what those blurs are, using a technique that has been researched and tested over the last 15 years.

In the words of Ucansi’s co-founder, Uri Polat,”We’re using the brain as glasses.” By training for 15 minutes, three times per week, for three months, GlassesOff helped clinical trial volunteers experience a reduction in eye age from 50.5 to 41.9 years. With GlassesOff training, reading speed was improved by four seconds per sentence — which would result in reducing the time it takes to read a page of the New York Times from 12 to seven minutes. Furthermore, if you can stomach beautiful 20-somethings playing the role of beaming, short-sighted “50-year-olds,” the GlassesOff website has a ton of clinical data and findings that really are quite impressive.

Yeah, she’s over 50… definitely…

GlassesOff will be released early in 2012 and will only be available for the iPhone, seemingly because of the high-quality Retina display. Presumably if a high-DPI Android phone was to emerge, though, GlassesOff might make its way to the Market too. Cost-wise, GlassesOff isn’t cheap — $95 for the first three months, and a “small monthly fee” for top-up training thereafter — but it’s certainly an attractive alternative to costly, invasive, surgical procedures. There’s also a hint that the software will be made available for Windows, but the site is fairly devoid of information on that front.

Finally, it’s worth noting that exercises to improve your eye sight — especially myopia, nearsightedness — have existed for many years. I have friends who claim to have weaned themselves off glasses entirely, simply through months of training. If only there was a GlassesOff equivalent for myopia rather than presbyopia…

Improve your eyesight with an iPhone app