EN FR
EN FR


Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

VRead

We are currently developing the VRead platform, a reading platform for digital content. We are now in the phase of building and testing prototypes with low-vision patients. We have started to conduct a qualitative Market research with patients to get a continuous feedback from them, discover their needs and thus better drive the developments. A special care is taken for ergonomics to optimize user experience in virtual reality. This is a crucial aspect in this project, especially because we primarily target a more fragile population so that we have to take into account their vision loss and cognitive skills. As for the technical aspect, we are using the Unity game engine along with the Oculus SDK, allowing us to deploy and test early on the Samsung GearVR mobile platform. For scripting the engine we code in C# using the proprietary directives of Unity. We ship the VRead Viewer with an operator application which allows for supervision and tuning of parameters of the reader in realtime. This application is written using the Unity SDK and is deployable under macOS, Windows and Linux.

This project received financial support from Université Côte d'Azur (France) (duration: 18 months, period: Aug. 2017– Jan. 2019 and Inria (via InriaHUB programme). It is done in collaboration with Aix-Marseille Université (CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Marseille, France), Centre hospitalier Pasteur 2 (service d’ophtalmologie, Nice, France) and University of Genoa (DIBRIS, Genoa, Italy).

Macular

We are currently developing the platform Macular, a large-scale simulations platform of impaired retinas, allowing to mimic specific degeneracies or pharmacologically induced impairments, as well as to emulate electric stimulation by prostheses. With this tool scientists will be able to design a simulation gui adapted to their need, so as to test hypotheses, make in-silico experiments prior to real experiments, test models, change the equations of a model and look at the impact of the dynamics. We hope it will become a standard for the community of modelers, experimentalists in the academic word, as well as for companies doing research and development. Macular will also help to better understand how to design algorithms to help visually impaired individuals. Especially, the Biovision team wants to develop computer algorithms for retinal prostheses that reproduce the functions performed by the bypassed parts of the eye: these algorithms can then be used as a “camera to eye translator” in retinal prosthetics.