It has always crossed my mind to make something on VR. Games are obvious to the medium but overwhelming as a starting point.

So happen I've gotten a bit more serious about my lazy eye lately. I've taken a look at conventional therapies the professionals do. But I forgot there's a device that's perfect for a problem like mine: my Quest 2.

Making something small and useful trumps making a game. It's technically less demanding and less creatively draining.

What I want to make going forward is a VR app that renders one thing but come out differently for the left and the right eyes. For that thing to make sense to the brain, both eyes have to converge and work together. That's the idea behind most conventional therapy.

Such an app can in theory renders anything for the therapy to work; an image, a video, whatever. But having seen an existing therapy, I think it's more useful to render something abundant across the web, a page of written words.

So the idea works like this: the same web page gets rendered twice, once on each eye. But each word would only appear on either one of the eyes.

If only one eye is working, only a random and scattered half of the texts are seen, the article would appear broken in pieces.

If both eyes are working but do not converge, the whole texts would be seen but they appear like disjointed puzzle pieces.

The tech stack

The cheapest way to make this happen is with WebXR. Essentially a web app you open with a browser within VR.

This is much more palatable than a game engine overkill (Godot or Unity).

I have a vague sense that WebXR API allows for manipulating unique outputs for each eye so I'm counting on that.

Visually how I imagine this app to be is a 3D scene, fixed location (no floating around), a rectangular block that renders a HTML page. Which is awkward because it's browser within a browser. I don't yet know how to make it receive a URL from the outside world (my reading list). But once it does, texts would come out like how I describe above.

On second thought, if Meta Quest web browser allows for plugin/extension (it's Webkit after all) that might mean I need not be make an inferior browser within a browser. But from what I can tell there isn't such a facility yet.