Abstract
People living with a degenerative retinal disease such as retinitis pigmentosa are oftentimes faced with difficulties navigating in crowded places and avoiding obstacles due to their severely limited field of view. The study aimed to assess the potential of different patterns of eye movement (scanning patterns) to (i) increase the effective area of perception of participants with simulated retinitis pigmentosa scotoma and (ii) maintain or improve performance in visual tasks. Using a virtual reality headset with eye tracking, we simulated tunnel vision of 20° in diameter in visually healthy participants (n = 9). Employing this setup, we investigated how different scanning patterns influence the dynamic field of view—the average area over time covered by the field of view—of the participants in an obstacle avoidance task and in a search task. One of the two tested scanning patterns showed a significant improvement in both dynamic field of view (navigation 11%, search 7%) and collision avoidance (33%) when compared to trials without the suggested scanning pattern. However, participants took significantly longer (31%) to finish the navigation task when applying this scanning pattern. No significant improvements in search task performance were found when applying scanning patterns.
Highlights
Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) describes a subset of diseases that lead to severe concentric loss of vision (“tunnel vision”) in the peripheral field of view (FoV) [1,2,3]
All values of dynamic field of view” (DFoV) are given as percentage of a 200◦ × 150◦ field
To the question “Do you believe that it is possible to adapt to at least one of the scanning patterns in a way that it feels natural and unobtrusive to use?”, three participants answered that they could imagine it for both scanning patterns, five participants could only imagine it for the left–right scanning pattern, and one participant could not imagine either of the scanning patterns being perceived as natural and unobtrusive
Summary
Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) describes a subset of diseases that lead to severe concentric loss of vision (“tunnel vision”) in the peripheral field of view (FoV) [1,2,3]. Peli [5], who showed that RP patients have a decreased average horizontal gaze amplitude compared to normal-sighted subjects This seemingly contradictory behavior is assumed to originate from the lack of visual stimuli in the periphery, as gaze movement was shown to be guided by attention [10], and the target of a saccade rarely lies outside of the visual area. It must be noted, that other studies such as that of Turano et al [11] have found contrasting results where the standard deviation of the gaze is significantly higher in RP patients compared to the visually healthy control group. This “gaze area over time” will in the following be called “dynamic field of view” (DFoV)
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