Virtual Reality Nighttime Stair Navigation Task to Characterize Glaucoma-Related Visual Disability

Researchers have developed virtual reality (VR) simulations to measure vision-related disability among patients with glaucoma and other eye disorders. For example, in a nighttime stair navigation task, participants were asked to walk up and then down 2 flights of stairs. This video illustrates the VR performance of a healthy individual (A) and a patient with glaucoma (B) in the task. The healthy individual took 179.5 seconds to complete the navigation with 0 collisions, and the patient with glaucoma took 465.1 seconds with 3 collisions. The performance suggests that VR simulations can help eye care professionals better understand from patients' perspective how visual impairment impairs them in their daily lives. MD indicates mean deviation; VFI, visual field index. Other simulated tasks involved supermarket shopping and city navigation. Click the related article link for videos illustrating those simulations and for complete details of the VR project.