Development of Vision Screening Tool in Virtual Reality: A Usability Assessment Study

In recent years, rapid advancements in technologies have opened new paradigms for vision screening and vision therapy by incorporating serious games (SGs) and eye trackers (ETs). The head-mounted display (HMD) with built-in ET makes it possible for researchers to study novel approaches for interaction and gaze movements in a 3-dimensional (3D) virtual world. While there are validated vision screening applications on desktop computers, these are limited by the size of the screen. Several spatial functional vision problems cannot be identified only using a laptop surfaces. In this study, we propose a vision screening application for VR devices with ET. The developed SG tasks for vision screening in VR are inspired by a vision screening application on laptops. The data of ET is stored in the database, and finally, the replays of tasks are prepared and displayed in VR. The usability of this solution was evaluated by seven participants using a user experience questionnaire (UEQ), observations and interviews. The results indicate the attractiveness of the VR application compared to laptop screens. However, further studies are needed to determine the validity of VR-based screening instruments.