PeriFocus - Training Peripheral Color- and Shape Detection in Virtual Reality.

Peripheral vision plays an important role in monitoring and detection of peripheral events not only in our daily life but also in complex and time-demanding situations. For example athletes in team sports such as Football or Handball, that require to not only keep track of one’s own team but also the opponents around oneself, benefit greatly from good peripheral vision. This paper examines the possibilities of training peripheral color and shape detection in virtual reality (VR). To this end we created an application called PeriFocus, a simple shooter game in VR that requires users to use their peripheral vision for object identification of the features color, size and shape. Our initial evaluation with six participants over 12 days revealed a statistical significant increase in peripheral color detection measured by an analog visual acuity test. This not only validates prior work conducted in a desktop setting but also highlights potential for future VR applications.