The Effects of Human Visual
Perception On Coordination

While developing a virtual 3D physics engine for NASA in the summer of 2003, I happened to see a strange trend that correlated eye-hand coordination with peripheral vision. To test the physics engine, I wrote an OpenGL application that simulated a game of racquetball. In OpenGL a developer must set the field of view as an angle of the distance left to right in a 360-degree plane one wants the user to see. With the VR glasses having a small FOV, I had to adjust this a bit to allow the user to see more of the peripheral vision in the main vision. In many sports, eye-hand coordination in the peripheral vision is extremely important. As I allowed more of the periphery to come into the main vision focus, users of the simulation experienced up to a ten-fold increase in their accuracy and ability to make contact with a small ball in 3D virtual space.

This research is still in development and hopes to understand how the periphery plays into our physical ability to coordinate eye-body movements. This research could be used to develop next generation contact lenses that bend a wearer's images to allow more peripheral vision to "pinch" into the main site window of that person's visual area.