Gaze-contingent real-time simulation of impaired vision in naturalistic displays

Effective management and treatment of glaucoma and other visual diseases depend on early diagnosis. However, early symptoms of many sever visual disease often go unnoticed until a significant portion of the visual field is lost. The ability to simulate the visual consequences of the disease offers potential benefits for patients and clinical education as well as for public awareness of its signs and symptoms. Experiments using simulated visual field defects could identify changes in behaviour, for example during driving, that one uses to compensate at the early stages of the disease's development. Furthermore, by understanding how visual field defects affect performance in visual tasks, we can help develop new strategies to cope with other devastating diseases such as macular degeneration. A Gaze-Contingent Display (GCD) system was developed to simulate an arbitrary visual field in a virtual environment. The system can estimate real-time gaze direction and eye position in earth-fixed coordinates during relatively large head movement, and thus it can be used in immersive projection based VE systems like the CAVE™. Arbitrary visual fields are simulated via OpenGL and Shading Language capabilities and techniques that are supported by the GPU, thus enabling fast performance in real time. In order to simulate realistic visual defects, the system performs multiple image processing operations including change in acuity, brightness, color, glare and image distortion. The final component of the system simulates different virtual scenes that the participant can navigate through and explore. As a result, this system creates an experimental environment that could be useful for studying the effects of low vision on everyday tasks such as driving and navigation.