Our latest publication: "Just Don’t Fall: An AI Agent’s Learning Journey Towards Posture Stabilisation"

Our latest publication has been chosed as one of the featured articles on AI journal

It takes you through the journey an AI agent takes to learn to stand still. The paper touches on the intertwining of reinforcement learning and biomechanical modelling to advance our understanding of human movement.

Hope you have a read here and give me you feedback.

What our eyes reveal? Part I Our Pupils

They say,
 "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder".
But after four years studying human eye movement, I feel more inclined to believe that,
   "Information, a lot of information, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Encoded in the way our eyes move is a lot of information that reflect our mental and psycological state. Most of these movements are involuntary; we cannot prevent them from happening. My PhD. research work has led me to read many studies investigating the relevance of different eye movements.

Pupil dilation (the pupil becomes bigger) and restrictions (the pupil becomes smaller) is one of those involuntary movements that reflects different mental and psychological states. The pupil's main function is to regulates the amount of light entering the eye. That mean that when we are looking at a scene where so much light is reflected unto our eyes, out pupil restrict. However, looking at a darker scene makes our pupils dilate to increase light intake for better vision.

However, other events can have an effect on our pupils. the fascinating thing is that most of these effects are involuntary. Lesion and drugs can cause a huge change in the pupil size which can be easily observed. Yet, very subtle changes to the pupil can happen due to external sensory events like fear, or with emotional and mental processes. 

In one of my papers [2], we investigated the efferct of the perception of risks while driving on the pupil diameter. And we found it can be a metric to determine whether a driver saw a hazard or not.

In another blog I might talk more about the different eye movements and what is hidden behind them.

If interested I have added below a list of related papers. 





[1] Iskander, J., Hossny, M., & Nahavandi, S. (2018). A review on ocular biomechanic models for assessing visual fatigue in virtual reality. IEEE Access, 6, 19345-19361.
[2] Iskander, J., Hanoun, S., Hettiarachchi, I., Hossny, M., Saleh, K., Zhou, H., ... & Bhatti, A. (2018, April). Eye behaviour as a hazard perception measure. In 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
[3] Iskander, J., Jia, D., Hettiarachchi, I., Hossny, M., Saleh, K., Nahavandi, S., ... & Hanoun, S. (2018, October). Age-Related Effects of Multi-screen Setup on Task Performance and Eye Movement Characteristics. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) (pp. 3480-3485). IEEE.
[4] Iskander, J., Attia, M., Saleh, K., Abobakr, A., Nahavandi, D., Hossny, M., & Nahavandi, S. (2019, October). Exploring the Effect of Virtual Depth on Pupil Diameter. In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) (pp. 1849-1854). IEEE.

Visual Fatigue and Ocular Biomechanics

In 2016, about 6.5 million virtual reality devices were shipped. By 2020, the market size of the virtual reality software and hardware is estimated to reach $40.4 billion USD.  

Virtual reality is known to most of us as a gaming tool, entertainment only. But, it's much more than that, indeed our life is soon turning into a huge virtual game. Virtual reality is an important aspect of military training, pilot training and even in medical staff training. It is also a part of our children's education and development. It is a mean of remote communication and knowledge transfer. It's growing rapidly and with time we will depend on it more and more like every other technology ever invented and changed our lives forever, the telephone, Internet, mobile phones and smart phones. 

But what are the side effect of being immersed in virtual environments for long periods of time? Are they safe? Can we continue our lives safely after using them? Can we drive our cars? Operate heavy machinery safely?  These questions are still to be answered. However, those of you who used any kind of virtual reality devices may have experienced nausea, dizziness, double vision or headaches. These are due to the conflict between the real world and the virtual world. Our brain accepts conflicting signals from our eyes. 

Our eyes are tightly coupled to our mental state and changes in our eye behaviour says a lot about our quality of experience and level of fatigue. The discomfort experienced in virtual environments is mainly due to mental overloading which can be seen in change in eye behaviour and can never happen intentionally. 

My work is to use our eye movements and the biomechanics of our vision systems to better design virtual environments devices.  

Till now, there are no comprehensible complete eye models that contain all behavioural and anatomic properties of the eyes and the eye muscles. That’s why we developed our model. This here is our model. It can simulate different eye movement systems from slow pursuit movements to very rapid saccadic movement that can reach 900 degree/second and also eye-head-neck coordination movement. 

We aim to use it to test virtual environments and calculate the discomfort of the experience. This will be used in modifying the virtual environment design and test it again and so on. 

We use our model to better understand our eyes and mental behaviour in virtual environments and thus to create healthier virtual environments and safer experience for our children and ourselves. 

For more details read my published papers:

[1] Iskander, J., Hossny, M. and Nahavandi, S., 2018. A review on ocular biomechanic models for assessing visual fatigue in virtual reality. IEEE Access, 6, pp.19345-19361. 

[2] Iskander, J., Hossny, M., Nahavandi, S. and Del Porto, L., 2018. An ocular biomechanic model for dynamic simulation of different eye movements. Journal of biomechanics, 71, pp. 208-216.
[3] Iskander, J., Hossny, M. and Nahavandi, S., 2019. Using biomechanics to investigate the effect of VR on eye vergence system. Applied ergonomics, 81, p.102883.