MYSIGHT VR
MySight provides audiences the ability to experience the perspectives of individuals with different forms of vision disabilities through a narrative-driven VR experience, with the goal of bringing understanding into how they see, perceive, and experience the world.
Created in Unity, and built for the Oculus Quest.
INSPIRATION
There are about 250 million people across the globe who are blind or low vision, of which nearly 200 million fall into the spectrum of low vision, which entails possessing some usable sight. Because low vision conditions cannot often be assisted by aids, such as glasses, there is often not an obvious tell externally for what is constantly being experienced internally. My goal with MySight is to help bridge awareness and understanding of these perspectives through embodying them in the virtual reality experience.
My inner target is to provide organizations such as the American Foundation for the Blind with a high-fidelity experience for what these vision conditions are actually like — for them to use when championing causes for the blind / low vision community. Until now, they have used simulators as seen below, essentially plastic glasses with markings on film, which is severely limiting in its depiction and potential for immersion.
This is why XR is such an important medium to carry this idea out, as it provides the best opportunity yet to do justice to what these vision disabilities are truly like.
My outer target is to emotionally resonate with people who experience the piece to bring more awareness about different types of vision disabilities as a whole. As a technologist with a vision disability myself, my hope is that with more awareness, this community will have an influence and not be an afterthought during the design phase itself for products and services in the future.
THE PROCESS
The vision disability I focused on for this scope is retinitis pigmentosa. People with this condition slowly lose their vision over time from outward in. There is a pit of clarity in the center, which shrinks to increased blurriness, to eventually loss of sight.
I decided to work towards creating the vision effects to be applied directly to the headset - or the camera in Unity - and to keep them as a completely separate layer from the environment. I felt this to be a scalable idea for the breadth of this project, so essentially the environments can be changed and swapped out separately.
I spent a lot of time thinking through how to achieve the pivotal blurry bulk of the vision giving way to the clear center. And I worked on scripting a shader to create this, which essentially adds different pixels together for a coordinate, and then consecutively does that throughout a region to create a wider blur effect:
I then created a web of these effects to make the blur denser to lighter, then to a clear center pit from outward in…as a nest respective to the headset:
Following that, I used a combination of Postprocessing and Photoshop to build the loss of sight from the outside, giving way to the blurriness - to complete the effect:
As a comparison, the upper image below is what the scene would look like standard in the headset with no effects…and the image below that is what the scene looks like with the retinitis pigmnetosa vision effect I created:
From there I set out to accomplish the next layer of the project: creating as photorealistic environment visuals as I could – in this case being on a subway train, as the crux of the narrative is around managing and adapting for wayfinding public spaces.
I first built the structures of the subway train, and subsequently worked on materials, textures, and lighting to provide as realistic an impact as possible. Finally, I conceptualized a live-action shot, 360-degree image of a subway tunnel nearing a station as the skybox of the Unity scene to set the environment seen through the windows of the train to be etched in reality. Pictured below is the evolution of that work:
And as a comparison, the upper image below is what the built environment scene would look like standard in the headset with no vision disability effects…and the image below that is what the scene looks like with the retinitis pigmnetosa vision effect from before atop the created environment:
And I am really excited to present for the first time what it is truly like to see with retinitis pigmentosa.
