The Effects of AMD Severities on Eye Movements in Virtual Environments

MCML Authors

Jesse Grootjen

→ Group Albrecht Schmidt
 Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media

Abstract

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a visual impairment that poses a global challenge due to limited access to regular checks. In this work, we investigate AMD by creating a virtual reality simulation of central-field loss. In the first step, interviews (N=6) revealed that dark circles are not accurate in terms of the perception of those affected by AMD. Thus, we developed a novel visualization that simulates different AMD severities, which better matches the interviewer’s explanations. In an evaluation user study (N=13), we focus on understanding AMD severities using our visualization in high-fidelity virtual reality scenes to preserve contextual cueing. In detail, we explore the impact of AMD on a visual search task and investigate the correlations between eye movement features and the severity of the simulation. We found significant differences in several eye movement characteristics as well as task performance. Our findings lay the groundwork for future simulation studies.

inproceedings

---

MuC 2025

Mensch und Computer. Darmstadt, Germany, Aug 31-Sep 03, 2025.

---

Authors

J. W. Grootjen • S. N. R. Yadla • S. Mayer

---

Links

DOI

---

Research Area

 C5 | Humane AI