Simulating visual impairments with mixed reality 

How do you truly understand what it’s like to live with a visual impairment? 

For teachers working with students with vision impairment, empathy alone isn’t enough. They need to develop a deeper practical understanding of what it’s like to live with vision loss in order to create accessible teaching and adjust the environments children live and learn in. 

Previously, staff at Linden Lodge were using physical glasses, which lack the ability to be fine-tuned to an individual’s specific experience. But technology like mixed reality can give you much more control and fidelity. 

Make Real has been collaborating with Linden Lodge School on InSight. It’s a mixed reality app that simulates the effects of a range of visual impairments, including:  

• Macular Disease 

• Retinitis Pigmentosa (leads to early-onset night blindness and peripheral vision loss) 

• Cataracts 

• Tunnel Vision  

• Colour Vision Deficiency 

• Light Perception  

• Hemianopia (loss of vision in half the visual field) 

With an app that allows incredibly specific fine-tuned simulations of these conditions, staff at Linden Lodge can much more easily recreate and understand any individual’s personal lived experience of their condition.

The challenge – simulating individual experiences of impaired vision 

Linden Lodge School is a day and residential special needs school for pupils with vision and multi-sensory impairment. Each student has a visual impairment, and each one is unique.  

And so, it’s vital that staff empathise with each student’s experience of their impairment. They need to understand:  

• The practical barriers their students face 

• How classroom materials appear from a student’s perspective 

• How environmental factors like lighting affect visibility 

• What reasonable adjustments look like in practice 

The solution – developing a mixed reality app 

We visited the school to explore what use cases immersive technology could address – and landed on detailed simulation of these impairments. 

Built for the Meta Quest 3, the app leverages the full-colour passthrough cameras. An app like this had to be mixed reality. A fully CGI simulation wouldn’t get across the real impact of a visual impairment. 

When a user selects an impairment in the app, it is shown with a preset simulating the most common experience. Intuitive sliders allow users to fine-tune the level of impairment, as well as apply it to a single eye. This makes it quick and easy to accurately simulate an individual’s experience of an impairment.

The app also provides an explanation of each impairment, the way it affects vision, and its causes. 

The detailed fine-tuning means anyone can get a much more accurate experience of how an individual’s visual impairment affects them. It’s an incredibly useful tool for teachers, as well as parents, who can better understand how their child sees, and support them at home. 

Future opportunities 

As you can imagine, we’re extremely proud of building this app that is so valuable to the school, its staff, and ultimately its students. 

There are so many other possibilities too.  

From charities, to hospitals, to vision researchers, assistive tech companies, and more, the InSight app is an ideal way to simulate experiences of vision impairment. 

If you’d like to learn more about it, you can get in touch below or contact us here.