Assessment of human perceptual sensitivity to physically non-conforming motion in virtual environments

Abstract

Recent advances in neuroscience have shown that the neuropathological disorders are closely related with diseases such as Alzheimers. Those damages are particularly associated with the intermediate visual perceptual processing which can cause the motion perception defects and abnormal visuospatial functions in daily living of patients. In this paper, we propose virtual reality-based assessment tools for measuring human perceptual sensitivity to dynamic erroneous motions, particularly designed to assess possible early stage of brain damages and its associated visual dysfunctions. The main thrust of this paper is on perceptually tuned virtual reality system that can produce realistic natural behavior. The proposed method contains multiple assessment layers to check the awareness of erroneous motion in natural scenes at various severities. Our VR-based game-type environment provides an effective test bed for various dynamic motion-based perceptual sensitivity experiments. Our initial human subject tests show that game-based test environment produces more coherent and consistent data, preferable to survey-based methods.