Éric Castet, PhD

Speaker

Éric Castet, PhD
Directeur de Recherches & Co-dir. Équipe Perception & Attention
Aix-Marseille Université/CNRS

Date and Time

Monday, April 12, 2021
11:10 am - 12:30 pm

Location

Zoom

Éric Castet's Abstract

From translational research on low vision to the use of virtual reality for rehabilitation and visual aids

Research on low vision in the last decades has produced a vast amount of data and many theoretical approaches and controversies. Behavioural and psychophysical studies have characterized some basic visual, attentional and oculo-motor factors limiting the visual perception of visually-impaire persons in general and of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) patients in particular. It seems timely to use this immense knowledge to develop innovative rehabilitation protocols and visual aids.

I will describe how recent results on text reading performance, as well as oculo-motor behaviour, measured in patients with AMD has encouraged us to develop systems that leverage the benefits of Virtual Reality for low vision persons. The numerous assets and potential applications of Virtual Reality as we envisage them will be exposed in details.

Developing these VR systems has also been an incentive for us to start in parallel a project whose goal is to provide an open-source and collaborative software (“PTVR” for “Perception Toolbox for Virtual Reality”) allowing our community to easily build Virtual Reality experiments. This software should allow vision scientists to perform controlled and replicable VR experiments leading to efficient multi-centric tests of novel rehabilitation techniques or visual aids based on Virtual Reality.