Supervisors
– Hui-Yin Wu, Centre Inria d’Université Côte d’Azur
– Paritosh Sharma, Postdoc, Inria d’Université Côte d’Azur
– Roger Pissard-Gibollet, Research engineer, Inria
Hosting laboratory
Centre Inria d’Université Côte d’Azur
Duration
3-4 months, starting between May – June 2025
Salary
~550€ / month
To apply
Email hui-yin.wu@inria.fr and paritosh.sharma@inria.fr with your CV and latest transcripts. A short (1 paragraph) statement of motivation is appreciated.
Description
This project is situated in the context of a joint project between ANR CREATTIVE3D (Inria Biovision team) and Handitechlab Inria, with the objective to develop an application in virtual reality (VR) to simulate visual impairments and their impact on various everyday activities. Specifically, low-vision conditions refer to visual impairments that cannot be full relieved through corrective lenses nor surgical procedures, strongly impacting daily interactions and activities of people suffering from these conditions. Currently, due to their invisibility, these impacts are often not well-understood by the general public nor by services with whom patients must interact. With the high level of immersion and interactivity afforded by VR, there is a strong interest to harness VR technologies to create realistic simulations that are representative of the difficulties and challenges faced by people living with visual handicaps.
The recruited intern will contribute to the development of a visual impairement simulator coupled with interactive 3D scenes and scenarios in VR. The expected outcome of this internship is a VR application that simulates low-vision conditions in realistic, interactive scenarios, targeted towards raising public awareness. The simulation will in addition have strong applications towards professional training, accessible content, product, and spatial design. In addition, this simulation allows researchers to study how vision impairments affect spatial awareness, navigation, and task performance in virtual environments, with the broader goal to ultimately inform the design of assistive technologies and rehabilitation strategies.
The intern will work on an existing software framework, with the following primary tasks:
1. Implement paramaterized shaders for a VR headset to simulate different types of visual field loss.
2. Design interactive 3D scenes in Unity that are representative of scenarios encountered by people living with visual handicaps.
3. Completion, documentation, and testing of the application for public distribution
4. Assist with studies using the created 3D scenes and evaluate with the simulated vision loss conditions.
Competences
– Development and programming skills for 3D game engines (Unity) and/or virtual reality headsets
– Competences in 3D content creation, backed by coursework and/or projects in Blender, Unity or Unreal
– Knowledge of graphics pipeline and shader language (GLSL or HLSL) is a plus
– Ability to communicate clearly with multidisciplinary colleagues
– A good level of French and English (speaking and writing)
References
Delachambre, Johanna, et al. “AMD Journee: A Patient Co-designed VR Experience to Raise Awareness Towards the Impact of AMD on Social Interactions.” Proceedings of the 2024 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences. 2024.
Wu, Hui-Yin, et al. “Exploring, walking, and interacting in virtual reality with simulated low vision: a living contextual dataset.” (2023).
Reddingius, Peter, David P. Crabb, and Pete Jones. “Shopping with sight loss: Using a virtual reality shopping task to systematically quantify the impact of a scotoma size and eccentricity on everyday quality of life.” Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science 65.7 (2024): 1849-1849.
Sipatchin, Alexandra, Miguel García García, and Siegfried Wahl. “Target maintenance in gaming via saliency augmentation: an early-stage scotoma simulation study using virtual reality (VR).” Applied Sciences 11.15 (2021): 7164.
Tlapale, Émilien, et al. The solaire project: A gaze-contingent system to facilitate reading for patients with scotomatas. Diss. INRIA, 2006.
