VALIDATION OF A NOVEL VR-BASED VISUAL PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT USING PTVR

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has become a popular platform for creating visual perception experiments. VR enhances the ability to study many different visual phenomena. However, the game engines used to create VR experiments have a steep learning curve, are time consuming, and frequently lack reproducibility. All these characteristics discourage researchers from creating VR experiments. Fortunately, a Python library called Perception Toolbox for Virtual Reality (PTVR) was released in 2018 that allows researchers to create high-level Python scripts which run a game engine – and the VR experiment – in the background. This approach is more user-friendly, efficient, and reproducible. However, there are no studies that have reported using PTVR for experimental design. A promising visual perception application for VR is visual rehabilitation. More specifically, the spatial remapping of text as a reading aid. In this paper, an experiment to test the utility of VR text remapping is created using the PTVR library. After development, the experiment was validated with a small group of central vision loss individuals.