Virtual Reality for Vision Science

Virtual reality (VR) allows us to create visual stimuli that are both immersive and reactive. VR provides many new opportunities in vision science. In particular, it allows us to present wide field-of-view, immersive visual stimuli; for observers to actively explore the environments that we create; and for us to understand how visual information is used in the control of behaviour. In contrast with traditional psychophysical experiments, VR provides much greater flexibility in creating environments and tasks that are more closely aligned with our everyday experience. These benefits of VR are of particular value in developing our theories of the behavioural goals of the visual system and explaining how visual information is processed to achieve these goals. The use of VR in vision science presents a number of technical challenges, relating to how the available software and hardware limit our ability to accurately specify the visual information that defines our virtual environments, and the interpretation of data gathered in experiments with a freely-moving observer in a responsive environment.