Shil VR Game Inspires Developer's Minimalist Approach to Amblyopia Treatment

A developer was inspired by Shil, a minimalist VR game combining psychological horror and puzzles that relies only on gaze and sound. Recognizing that traditional amblyopia treatments like eye patches and red-blue glasses are uncomfortable and often abandoned, they explored using a similar gaze-driven design for therapy. Their project, Amblyotube, uses three custom Unity shaders on Meta Quest to blur the dominant eye, highlight the weaker eye, and present focus cues during user-chosen YouTube videos. To maintain a 90Hz frame rate, AI person-segmentation masks are precomputed on a server and streamed with the video, trading local playback support for performance. Profiling showed the shaders consume only about 1.2 ms of the 11.1 ms frame budget.