Towards Developing an Immersive Virtual Reality Applications for Supporting Vision Screening – A User Study

Abstract

Functional Vision Problems (FVPs) are problems related to eye musculature and/or eye coordination rather than visual acuity. Such problems are rarely diagonsed through standard vision control, and can get worse with age if not properly treated. However, a thorough vision screening of many requires enormous resources from society, which is not possible today. This paper illustrates current challenges to screen functional vision problems (FVPs) using immersive VR applications. For this, a laptop-based program for screening oculomotor difficulties (OMDs), which is a particular type of FVP, is transferred to a head-mounted display (HMD) with integrated eye-tracking technology (ET). The program records the participants' small eye movements via ETs, e.g., fixation stability, saccades, and smooth pursuits during task performance, and allows examining irregularities pointing to OMDs. The paper illustrates the iterative development of the immersive VR program based on continuous feedback from a vision expert. Data was collected from a vision expert and 7 end-users. The results include user experience and usability evaluation of the immersive VR program compared to the laptop version. It discusses the necessity for having vision expertise during specific faces of the development process and presents critical issues for further development of applications utilizing eye movements for more accurate support for vision screening, e.g., issues regarding measuring depth perception and hand-eye coordination