Vision Loss Impact on Navigation in Virtual Reality

"Participants will steer a virtual car with the goal of staying in the center of a single-lane roadway while traveling at a constant speed of 26.6 m/s (approximately 60 miles/hr). The roadway alternates between a series of straights and turns of different radii to both the left and the right. This allows for careful control of task difficulty, and for the repeated presentation of specific conditions across multiple trials (i.e. turns in the road) in a randomized order. In addition, the density of the visual texture elements in the virtual environment that provide optic flow (OF) signal is also varied. The low-density OF condition has no road texture or foliage, and only the solid road edges on a flat-black ground plane. The medium-density OF condition has sparse textural elements distributed on the ground plane, and the high-density OF condition has high density road texture and a canopy of road-side trees that provide texture extending far above the horizon."