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.
[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.
