Speaker: Lei Liu, School of Optometry, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Time: 2017-09-15 13:30 - 15:00

Venue: Room 1115, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) has found many therapeutic and rehabilitation applications. Its potential in improving quality of life in patients with severely impaired vision (low vision) is not beyond anybody’s imagination. However, like any VR therapy, the key issue is whether exposure to a virtual environment can help low vision patients to solve real world problems. An orientation & mobility task, determining the safest moment to cross a signal controlled street, was selected to establish the transferability of VR learning to real streets. Patients with vision too poor to see the pedestrian signals were training to use the start of the cars traveling in the same direction (parallel direction) to determine the safest time to start crossing. An elaborate scoring method was used to quantify the safety of the patient’s crossing decisions on real streets before and after receiving training in virtual streets. Another group of patients were trained in real streets to serve as control.  Training in VR drastically improved the patient’s crossing safety in real streets. The post-training safety of the VR-trained group was as good as that of the real-street trained controls. Virtual reality can become a viable platform for a wide range of low vision rehabilitation tasks.