Virtual Reality City 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, participants wearing VR headsets were asked to navigate a virtual distance of approximately 90 m under nighttime conditions in a city area modeled on Hong Kong. In this video, the healthy individual took 78.7 seconds to complete the task with 0 collisions, and the patient with glaucoma took 167.8 seconds with 1 collision. 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. Click the related article link for video illustrating performance on other simulated tasks and for complete details of the VR project.