Simulating vision impairments in virtual and augmented reality

Abstract

There are at least 2.2 billion people affected by vision impairments worldwide, and the number of people suffering from common eye diseases, which show a higher prevalence with age, is expected to rise in the years to come, due to factors like aging of the population. We need to understand and quantify the effects of vision impairments on perception, to design cities, buildings, or lighting systems that are accessible for people with vision impairments. In this thesis, we present a system and a methodology to simula te vision impairments, such as refractive errors, cataracts, cornea disease, and age-related macular degeneration in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), which allows us to conduct user studies in VR or AR with people with healthy eyesight and graphically simulated vision impairments. We present a calibration technique that allows us to calibrate individual simulated symptoms to the same level of severity for every user, taking hardware constraints as well as vision capabilities of users into account. We conducted three studies to (1) show that current international standards and norms do not sufficiently consider people with vision impairments, (2) investigate how different lighting systems can affect the perception of people with cataracts and (3) test, evaluate and adjust our improved AR simulation together with cataract patients in a pilot study, showing the flexibility and potential of our approach.