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Peter F. Reddingius 1 David P. Crabb 1 Pete R. Jones 1
1. School of Health and Psychological Sciences, Department of Optometry and Visual Sciences, City, University of London, United KingdomPETER.REDDINGIUS@CITY.AC.UK
PURPOSE
PURPOSE
To quantify the relative impact of scotoma size and eccentricity on vision-related Quality of Life (vrQoL).
METHODS
METHODS
Normally sighted subjects (n=45) were asked to locate household products in a virtual reality (VR) supermarket. Participants were able to physically move around the supermarket (body-tracking), using their hands to pick up prespecified items from shelves and deposit them into a virtual trolley. The open-source “VARID” toolkit (varid.co.uk) was used to generate gaze-contingent scotomas of variable size and eccentricity. Each participant experienced five of nine bilateral scotomas, varying in eccentricity (1° – 9°) and/or radius (1° - 9° ). Outcome measures included task-completion times; quantities of head, eye, and body movements; and numbers of errors (e.g., number of items knocked over).
RESULTS
RESULTS
Participants spent more time finding all items in an aisle when experiencing a 9°radius scotoma at 9°eccentricity (mean increase vs. no impairment = 66 secs, P=.023) or a 6°radius scotoma at 6 °eccentricity (58 secs., P<.001) {see figure 3}.
That effect only decreased marginally when experiencing a 1°radius scotoma at 1°eccentricity (38 secs. P=.029).
The scotoma of 9 °radius and 9 °eccentricity also caused significant increases in eye and head movements.
CONCLUSIONS
CONCLUSIONS
The eccentricity of a scotoma (and specifically whether it infringes upon the fovea) greatly impacts performance on the present visually guided “real world” search task, more so than the absolute size of the scotoma.
More generally, this work demonstrates the potential of immersive, interactive virtual reality environments to objectively quantify vision related quality of life.
[1] Jones PR, Ometto G. Degraded reality: using VR/AR to simulate visual impairments. In: 2018 IEEE Workshop on Augmented and Virtual Realities for Good (VAR4Good). IEEE; 2018:1-4.[2] Chow-Wing-Bom H, Dekker TM, Jones PR. The worse eye revisited: Evaluating the impact of asymmetric peripheral vision loss on everyday function. Vision research. 2020;169:49-57.[3] Jones PR, Somoskeöy T, Chow-Wing-Bom H, Crabb DP. Seeing other perspectives: evaluating the use of virtual and augmented reality to simulate visual impairments (OpenVisSim). NPJ digital medicine. 2020;3(1):32.
Figure 1
Figure 1
Photograph of author PFR (A) holding two products and the view from the right monitor inside the headset (B). The scotoma is located over the label of the orange item held by the author, making the label unreadable but still showing the shape of the object.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Images displaying the 15 different scotomas used in the study. Plot A shows the radius and eccentricity of each scotoma. Plots B1, B2 and B3 show the scotoma as it would look on a 24-2 visual field report. Small black lines show 10° intervals from the fovea, with the right branch extending to 30°. The scotoma in figure 1 is in B2 with a radius and eccentricity of 6°.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Plot A showing the difference in the time spent in a supermarket aisle with a simulated scotoma of a specific radius and eccentricity compared to the no scotoma condition. Box-plots B1, B2 and B3 showing the increase in time spent in the aisle for the scotomas with an eccentricity of nine degrees (B1), the scotomas with an eccentricity of six degrees (B2) and the scotomas with a radius of 1 degree (B3) compared to the no scotoma condition.
Supplementary video 1
Supplementary video 1
Video of researcher PFR finding the required five items in an aisle in the virtual supermarket. This video is recorded from the monitor of the computer that is running the experiment and only captures the view from the left eye. Be sure to watch in 1080p quality for the best experience.
Supplementary video 2
Supplementary video 2
Video to show how the supermarket looks and feels with different lighting conditions, which is a possible follow-up question that we aim to examine. Be sure to watch in 1080p for the best experience.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 955590
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