VisionPainter: Authoring Experience of Visual Impairment in Virtual Reality.

We present an authoring system and VR viewer that simulate various types of visual impairments. As we all have different visual acuities, it is important for sighted people to understand how people with low vision see. One of the ways to understand their residual vision is to experience it through displays, goggles, and head mounted displays. Although existing research has shown that vision simulation systems are helpful for instilling empathy in non-visually impaired people, they can only handle one or a few specific visual impairments, or it has been difficult for users to change the types of impairment or adjust the severity in real time. In contrast, we propose VisionPainter, 2D authoring application to create a wide variety of vision impairments through painting a viewer with several brush tools that can simulate visual functions. The paintings are transformed into corresponding filters, and reflected in virtual reality viewers immediately. We discuss application scenarios of the system in which it creates novel interactions over existing approaches.