Maintaining fixation by children in a virtual reality version of pupil perimetry

Abstract

The assessment of the visual field in young children continues to be a challenge. Children often do not sit still, fail to fixate stimuli for longer durations, and have limited verbal ca-pacity to report visibility. Therefore, we introduced a head-mounted VR display with gaze-contingent flicker pupil perimetry (VRgcFPP). We presented large flickering patches at different eccentricities and angles in the periphery to evoke pupillary oscillations, and three fixation stimulus conditions to determine best practices for optimal fixation and pupil response quality. A total of twenty children (3-11y) passively fixated a dot, counted the re-peated appearance of an animated character(counting task), and watched an animated movie in separate trials of 80s each (20 patch locations, 4s per location).The results showed that gaze precision and accuracy did not differ significantly across the fixation conditions but pupil amplitudes were strongest for the dot and count task. The VR set-up appears to be an ideal apparatus for children to allow free range of movement, an engaging visual task, and reliable eye measurements. We recommend the use of the fixation count-ing task for pupil perimetry because children enjoyed it the most and it achieved strongest pupil responses.