NCT05135195

A Virtual Reality Platform Simulating Visual Impairment for Testing of Electronic Travel Aids and Performing Orientation and Mobility Training

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 98 (actual)
• Sponsor: NYU Langone Health · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 80 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

In this study, the study team utilize virtual reality (VR) to simulate visual impairments of different types and severity in healthy subjects. The platform implements three of the most widespread forms of visual impairment in the United States (US): age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetic retinopathy (DR), and glaucoma, each with three levels of severity, (mild, moderate, and severe). At present, glaucoma is further developed toward a multidimensional visual impairment simulation. The platform is utilized: i) to provide a safe, controllable, and repeatable set of environments for development and preliminary testing of electronic travel aids (ETAs) in a variety of conditions (i.e., using the ETA to navigate in the immersed environment); and ii) to equip blind and low vision (BVI) professionals, inclusive of orientation and mobility (O\&M) instructors, with a controlled, tunable training platform for skill/capacity building, assessment, and refinement of O\&M techniques, as well as visually impaired trainees with a safe and immersive environment to improve their O\&M skills and learn novel techniques. Two sets of hypothesis-driven experiments are proposed to assess the feasibility of the platform with respect to these two objectives.

Conditions

• Visual Impairment
• Age-Related Macular Degeneration
• Diabetic Retinopathy
• Glaucoma

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	In-House Developed VR Platform - AMD, DR, Glaucoma	Participants will conduct experiments using commercial VR headsets and controllers. Visual impairments will be systematically simulated in VR. There are three visual impairment simulations (AMD, DR, and glaucoma) at three levels of severity (mild, moderate, or severe). Symptoms' simulation tools include a gaussian blur shader, distortion shader, and a culling mask with a gray spot in the middle.
OTHER	In-House Developed VR Platform - Glaucoma	In the second set of experiments, a multidimensional visual impairment simulation of a single pathology (glaucoma) will be used at three levels of severity (mild, moderate, or severe). The post-processing package to simulate includes glare, difficulty in light, change adaptation, ambient occlusion, visual clutter, and overall blurred effect. The shader graph package will be used to create a distortion localized on assets surfaces only.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-10-24
• Primary completion: 2022-10-20
• Completion: 2022-10-20
• First posted: 2021-11-26
• Last updated: 2023-07-03

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States