On the Validity of Virtual Reality Applications for Professional Use: A Case Study on Color Vision Research and Diagnosis

In recent years, there have been very important advances in graphic computing and technology related to the capture and representation of real objects in both 2 and 3 dimensions. One of these technologies is virtual reality, which can be incorporated into common tasks in research laboratories, especially in laboratories related to color vision and lighting research. To incorporate virtual reality devices into research tasks, newly developed applications must be validated with existing and known tests or techniques. The objective of this work was to study the validity of a commercial VR system for research and diagnosis in color vision. We carried out a comparative study on the behavior of these immersive systems for viewing 3D scenes in real time using a color vision test. In particular, we implemented a virtual version of the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue test and compared the results obtained by 17 normal and 3 defective observers in both the physical and virtual tests. The results show that the functionality of both tests is very similar and that the diagnosis of both methods is equivalent. Detailed analysis of the results of both tests indicates that there is a slight difference in scale between the two tests. This difference in scale indicates a greater difficulty in the case of the virtual test but does not affect the final diagnosis. This could be due to the greater difficulty in using a head-mounted display (HMD).