Company was started by James Blaha.

By Raif Karerat

An entrepreneur who has been afflicted his entire life with strabismus — a vision condition colloquially referred to as crossed eyes — has launched a company that aims to use virtual reality to cure vision disorders.

Jame Blaha had contemplated different ideas to fix his condition for years, including using two projectors to send different images to each eye to help strengthen the weaker one. However, when the Oculus Rift development kit came out, he realized the headset could do exactly that in a much more streamlined, ergonomic fashion.

“When I started [experimenting], I didn’t have any stereo vision,” he told Quartz. That was almost two years ago when the vision in his weak eye was 20/70 while wearing glasses. The measurement indicates at 20 feet, he was able to see what a person with perfect vision could see 70 feet away. In July, he reported gaining about 80 percent of his stereo vision and near 20/20 vision with his glasses.

Blaha’s company, See Vividly, has already garnered a $700,000 seed round.

“That was a fundamental new thing that was unlocked by virtual-reality technology, and I thought it was amazing,” Arvind Gupta — an investor at SOSVentures, which led the seed round — told Quartz. What made the company so attractive to him was that it “figured out how to solve a problem that was previously impossible.”

The company is about a third of the way through an extensive nine-month trial involving 50 to 60 participants at the University of California San Francisco to study the effects of See Vividly’s software, Vivid Vision.

“So far what we’re seeing is consistent with what we’re expecting,” Blaha said.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, a small trial in Slovakia saw improvement in nine of 15 participants with amblyopia — commonly referred to as lazy eye — of which strabismus is a type.

The company plans to release a home version of the VR-tech when Oculus ships its first consumer headset in early 2016. The requirements for the software include an Oculus headset, Leap Motion controller (which tracks natural hand movements), a game controller, and high-end desktop computer.

According to PC World, the total cost of the Oculus headset and a computer powerful enough to run it will set consumers back $1,500, as described by Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe.