A System for the Measurement of the Subjective Visual Vertical Using a Virtual Reality Device

Abstract

The Subjective Visual Vertical (SVV) is a common test for evaluating the perception of verticality. Altered verticality has been connected with disorders in the otolithic, visual or proprioceptive systems, caused by stroke, Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis, among others. Currently, this test is carried out using a variety of specific, mostly homemade apparatuses that include moving planes, buckets, hemispheric domes or a line projected in a screen. Our aim is to develop a flexible, inexpensive, user-friendly and easily extensible system based on virtual reality for the measurement of the SVV and several related visual diagnostic tests, and validate it through an experimental evaluation. Our evaluation showed that the proposed system is suitable for the measurement of SVV in healthy subjects. The next step is to perform a more elaborated experimentation on patients and compare the results with the measurements obtained from traditional methods.