Development of a system to provide different fields of view to eyes with a function to generate rapid movements

We developed a system that provides a human user with the artificial oculomotor ability to control their eyes independently, which was named Virtual Chameleon after Chameleons. Virtual Chameleon consists of two independently controlled CCD cameras, a 3D tracking sensor system and a head-mounted display. The Virtual Chameleon control independently postures of two cameras to follow the sensors of the 3D tracking system smoothly. The successful users of the system were able to actively control visual axes by manipulating 3D sensors held by their both hands, to watch independent view fields presented to the left and right eyes, and to look around as chameleons do. Although it is thought that those independent fields of view the user of Virtual Chameleon corresponds to smooth movements on human eye movements, the system did not have functions to control angles of cameras rapidly in way corresponding to saccadic eye movements and compensatory movements as numerous animals including human do. In this paper, we implemented functions to control angles camera rapidly corresponding to saccadic eye movements in Virtual Chameleon, and we performed fundamental experiments to evaluate effects on the user´s visual capabilities.