A VR-based user study on the effects of vision impairments on recognition distances of escape-route signs in buildings

Abstract

In workplaces or publicly accessible buildings, escape routes are signposted according to official norms or international standards that specify distances, angles and areas of interest for the positioning of escape-route signs. In homes for the elderly, in which the residents commonly have degraded mobility and suffer from vision impairments caused by age or eye diseases, the specifications of current norms and standards may be insufficient. Quantifying the effect of symptoms of vision impairments like reduced visual acuity on recognition distances is challenging, as it is cumbersome to find a large number of user study participants who suffer from exactly the same form of vision impairments. Hence, we propose a new methodology for such user studies: By conducting a user study in virtual reality (VR), we are able to use participants with normal or corrected sight and simulate vision impairments graphically. The use of standardized medical eyesight tests in VR allows us to calibrate the visual acuity of all our participants to the same level, taking their respective visual acuity into account. Since we primarily focus on homes for the elderly, we accounted for their often limited mobility by implementing a wheelchair simulation for our VR application.

Dynamic and Effect-Driven Output Service Selection for IoT Environments Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

“…To reduce the high cost of evaluating the metric practice, we are investigating the use of VR technologies known to be effective in obtaining realistic and interactive replications of physical experiments [8], [38], [39]. Recent experiments on visual acuity testing [38], simulation of escape signs for evacuation [8], and visual field examination [39] were successfully reproduced in VR with better efficiency than experiments in physical environments. Therefore, we conducted a similar user study in a VR environment to determine whether we could obtain results consistent with those observed in the laboratory environment.…”

“…If one of the visual output services is selected without considering the user's physical context, the user may not recognize the navigation required because the associated public display would not be in the user's sight. Therefore, visual output services should be selected by considering the personal and environmental contexts of the users, such as visual acuity [8] and viewing angle toward public displays [9] that may affect the recognition of visual content. However, it is challenging to understand and quantitatively measure how various human and environmental factors affect the effectiveness of delivering the physical effects from visual output services to a user.…”

Seeing other perspectives: evaluating the use of virtual and augmented reality to simulate visual impairments (OpenVisSim)

“…The idea of using data from ophthalmic eye-tests to generate clinically relevant impairments has been proposed most convincingly by Thompson et al (2017) 39 . And many people have developed VR/AR sight-loss simulators [46][47][48][49] of varying technical sophistication. To our knowledge, however, this is the first system to integrate these elements together into a single, functioning system, and it is the first to be shown capable of eliciting plausible impairments on the sorts of typical, 'real world' tasks of daily living that patients really value (i.e., rather than purely perceptual changes in the user's ability to recognize words or letters 39,46 ).…”

“…And many people have developed VR/AR sight-loss simulators [46][47][48][49] of varying technical sophistication. To our knowledge, however, this is the first system to integrate these elements together into a single, functioning system, and it is the first to be shown capable of eliciting plausible impairments on the sorts of typical, 'real world' tasks of daily living that patients really value (i.e., rather than purely perceptual changes in the user's ability to recognize words or letters 39,46 ). We anticipate that the present findings would generalize to other similar system, should any be developed in future, and that the realism of such systems will only increase as the hardware and algorithms continue to develop.…”

Three Common Misconceptions about Visual Impairments

“…The text is readable in the last picture as well as a third blue pen. While the acuity is affected by blurred vision [7], knowledge of the environment helps. Looking back to the left, note that, once you know an object exist, it becomes easier to "see" or "guess" where it is.…”