Immersive Virtual Reality for Visuo-motor Integration Skill Assessment

In a private testing room at the testing site, children will complete descriptive functional sensory-motor tests with a registered physical therapist. They will then complete the paper-and-pencil visual-motor integration test (Beery-Buktenica Test of Visual Motor Integration) while seated comfortably. They will then undertake the visuomotor integration tasks using a touch screen computer, completing 5 trials of each of 3 target positions under visual-only, motor-only, and visual-motor integration conditions. The task will be displayed on a 20" HP Spectre touch-screen laptop with an RTX 960 graphics card. Eye-tracking will be undertaken using a Tobii Nano which integrates with Unity software. Kinematics of hand movement during reach to touch as well as head movements will be collected using an Orbbec Astra depth-sensing camera. Accuracy of touch is recorded by custom-written software tracking X-Y touch coordinates on the screen. All data collection modalities are synced and integrated using LabVIEW. Children will then complete the same tasks in the 3D HMD virtual environment. We will use the VIVE Pro EYE, the leading commercially-available immersive VR system, which has with a 110 degree trackable field of view and an embedded eye tracker. Arm movements are tracked by lightweight trackers attached via Velcro arm band to children's forearms and ManusVR motion tracking gloves worn on the hands. Head movements are tracked by position sensors in the HMD. Trackers and gloves enable upper extremity interaction with objects in the virtual world. An Alienware m15 gaming laptop with an NVIDA GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card will run the task. Following the visual-only, motor-only, and visual-motor integration tasks, children will complete a new visual-motor integration task involving virtual object transport, where they will grasp a virtual object and transport it to a new location in the virtual environment. Finally, they will complete the object transport task in a more audiovisually-complex virtual environment in the HMD.