Simulating Cataracts in Virtual Reality

Exploring the Educational Value and Impact of Vision-Impairment Simulations on Sympathy and Empathy with XREye

“…While each condition affects vision differently [2], common symptoms caused by many corneal diseases include the following: Our simulation of cornea disease (see Figure 2) is modeled after the report of a person affected by the condition, describing it as "looking through opal glass". To achieve this visual impression, we used our effects pipeline [13] to combine the following effects: 1.…”

“…To simulate distorted vision caused by abnormal blood vessel growth and fluid under the retina, we distorted the UV coordinates according to a distortion texture. This distortion texture was created from a combination of a water texture material for small random distortions and some parameterized circular distortions that create inward or outward bulges (see our previous work [13] for implementation details). Next, we calculated the luminosity of the pixels to create a grayscale version of the image.…”

“…Over the last few years, we have developed a methodology, and implemented a new system, to simulate medically-informed complex eye-disease patterns and conduct quantitative and qualitative user studies on vision impairments in XR [8][9][10][11][12][13]. We introduced an effects pipeline that supports combining multiple simulated effects that can be adjusted individually, a symptom-calibration methodology to calibrate all simulated symptoms to the same level of severity for different users, and a symptom-matching method that facilitates the adjustment of the simulation together with patients that have an eye disease in one eye and clear vision in the other eye.…”