Goal-directed throwing is ubiquitous in virtual reality (VR) games, demanding spatial and temporal accuracy to perceive position and motion, as well as to plan, and execute movement. Autistic individuals often show superior local visual sensitivity, which may paradoxically delay global visual processing, leading to incongruent visuomotor integration (VMI). Understanding VMI in VR and exploring supportive designs are vital for enhancing accessibility. We assessed VMI in VR with different levels of visual cluttering with autistic (n = 10) and non-autistic (n = 10) adults using overhand throwing with eye and hand tracking, comparing VR to identical physical environments and VR to visually simplified VR. In VR, all participants exhibited decreased throwing accuracy, increased visual scanning, and prolonged hand preparation phases. These differences were more significant in autistic individuals. However, our study highlighted an important effect: simplifying visual information in VR throwing resulted in autistic individuals outperforming non-autistic peers.

Autistic individuals commonly experience visuomotor integration (VMI) difficulties that impact upper extremity movements such as goal-directed throwing, which commonly exists in everyday activities and movement-based games. Autistic individuals often show superior ability towards visual details and inefficient global visual information processing, leading to incongruent VMI. Virtual reality (VR) provides adequate and accurate eye and hand movement data and allows readily individualized design, making it a good option for VMI assessment and potential game-based VMI intervention for autistic individuals. We conducted a pilot study with eight non-autistic young adults comparing visual-proprioceptive accuracy and VMI in VR and in an equivalent physical environment (PE) using a spatial estimation task and a goal-directed throwing task. We observed reduced visual and visual-proprioceptive accuracy in VR compared to PE. Success rates of throwing were lower in VR, with more gaze scanning of the environment and shorter fixation duration on task-relevant objects. Participants spent a longer time preparing for movement execution and had higher hand velocity at release in VR. Subsequent research will compare visual-proprioceptive accuracy and VMI between VR and PE in autistic individuals and explore their relationship with autistic traits.

Parallel vectors (PV), the loci where two vector fields are parallel, are commonly used to represent curvilinear features in 3D for data visualization. Methods for extracting PV usually operate on a 3D grid and start with detecting seed points on a cell face. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first provably correct test that determines the parity of the number of PV points on a cell face. The test only needs to sample along the face boundary and works for any choice of the two vector fields. A discretization of the test is described, validated, and compared with existing tests that are also based on boundary sampling. The test can guide PV-extraction algorithms to ensure closed curves wherever the input fields are continuous, which we exemplify in extracting ridges and valleys of scalar functions.