Interface[s] Montréal

Immersion and Virtual Reality

Jocelyn Faubert

Université de Montréal, École d’optométrie, NSERC-Essilor Reseach Chair on Presbyopia and Visual Perception

Understanding human behavior with immersive virtual environments

View the presentation [In French]

Full-immersive displays such as the CAVE system have been originally developed for visualization and industrial uses. Using such an environment for the study of human performance involves a number of challenges, as it was not originally designed for such a purpose. For several years now our laboratory has adapted the CAVE technology to help us understand human behavior.

We are interested in determining the effect of age-related changes on perception, posture and visual-motor control in ecological environments. In particular, we try to understand how prebyopes cope with visual deformations that are induced by corrective lenses. Presbyopia is an age-related change that affects our capacity to focus at near. The first signs usually appear in the 40s and almost 100% of individuals in the 50s are presbyopic. Our initial results are extremely promising and demonstrate that a full-immersive environment is a very powerful tool for assessing human performance but this is a technology that still requires enormous resources in both initial cost and maintenance and may not be generally accessible in the near future.

Picture taken of the shopping center environment developed by our lab to assess effects of distortions and lens design on performance I ecological contexts.

The Head of the Chaire CRSNG-Essilor on Presbyopia and Visual Perception, Jocelyn Faubert is a Professor at École d’optométrie de l’Université de Montréal. He is internationally renowned expert on issues concerning visual perception, vision of the elderly, and neuropsychology. Dr. Faubert directs the work of ten masters and doctoral students as well as a team of researchers and post-doctoral fellows in his psychophysical and visual perception laboratory. He is graduate in experimental neuropsychology from Concordia University. He also completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University. He is a member of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, the Vision Sciences Society and the Society for Neuroscience.