We present a virtual reality (VR) experience designed to raise awareness towards the impact of low-vision conditions on social interactions for patients. Specifically, we look at age-related macular degeneration (AMD) that results in the loss of central visual field acuity (a.k.a. a scotoma), which hinders AMD patients from perceiving facial expressions and gestures, and can bring about awkward interactions, misunderstandings, and feelings of isolation. Using VR, we co-designed an experience composed of four scenes from the life of AMD patients through structured interviews with the patients and orthoptists. The experience takes the perspective of a patient, and throughout the scenarios, provides voiceovers on their feelings, the challenges they face, how they adapt to their situation, and also bits of advice on how their quality of life was improved through considerate actions from people in their social circles. A virtual scotoma is designed to follow the gaze of the user using the HTC Vive Focus 3 headset with an eye-tracking module. Setting out from a formal definition of awareness, we evaluate our experience on three components of awareness – knowledge, engagement, and empathy – through established questionnaires, continuous measures of gaze and skin conductance, and qualitative feedback. Carrying out a experiment with 29 participants, we found not only that our experience had a positive and strong impact on the awareness of participants towards AMD, but also that the scotoma and events had observable influences on gaze activity and emotions. We believe this work outlines the advantages of immersive technologies for public awareness towards conditions such as AMD, and opens avenues to conducting studies with fine-grained, multimodal analysis of user behaviour for designing more engaging experiences.

The use of electrotactile feedback in Virtual Reality (VR) has shown promising results for providing tactile information and sensations. While progress has been made to provide custom electrotactile feedback for specific interaction tasks, it remains unclear which modulations and rendering algorithms are preferred in rich interaction scenarios. In this paper, we propose a unified tactile rendering architecture and explore the most promising modulations to render finger interactions in VR. Based on a literature review, we designed six electrotactile stimulation patterns/effects (EFXs) striving to render different tactile sensations. In a user study (N=18), we assessed the six EFXs in three diverse finger interactions: 1) tapping on a virtual object; 2) pressing down a virtual button; 3) sliding along a virtual surface. Results showed that the preference for certain EFXs depends on the task at hand. No significant preference was detected for tapping (short and quick contact); EFXs that render dynamic intensities or dynamic spatio-temporal patterns were preferred for pressing (continuous dynamic force); EFXs that render moving sensations were preferred for sliding (surface exploration). The results showed the importance of the coherence between the modulation an the interaction being performed and the study proved the versatility of electrotactile feedback and its efficiency in rendering different haptic information and sensations.

While user's perception and performance are predominantly examined independently in virtual reality, the Action-Specific Perception (ASP) theory postulates that the performance of an individual on a task modulates this individual's spatial and time perception pertinent to the task's components and procedures. This paper examines the association between performance and perception and the potential effects that tactile feedback modalities could generate. This paper reports a user study (N=24), in which participants performed a standardized Fitts's law target acquisition task by using three feedback modalities: visual, visuo-electrotactile, and visuo-vibrotactile. The users completed 3 Target Sizes × 2 Distances × 3 feedback modalities = 18 trials. The size perception, distance perception, and (movement) time perception were assessed at the end of each trial. Performance-wise, the results showed that electrotactile feedback facilitates a significantly better accuracy compared to vibrotactile and visual feedback, while vibrotactile provided the worst accuracy. Electrotactile and visual feedback enabled a comparable reaction time, while the vibrotactile offered a substantially slower reaction time than visual feedback. Although amongst feedback types the pattern of differences in perceptual aspects were comparable to performance differences, none of them was statistically significant. However, performance indeed modulated perception. Significant action-specific effects on spatial and time perception were detected. Changes in accuracy modulate both size perception and time perception, while changes in movement speed modulate distance perception. Also, the index of difficulty was found to modulate all three perceptual aspects. However, individual differences appear to affect the magnitude of action-specific effects. These outcomes highlighted the importance of haptic feedback on performance, and importantly the significance of action-specific effects on spatial and time perception in VR, which should be considered in future VR studies.