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Given the inherent visual affordances of Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) used for Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), they have been actively used over many years as assistive and therapeutic devices for the people who are visually impaired. In this paper, we report on a scoping review of literature describing the use of HMDs in these areas. Our high-level objectives included detailed reviews and quantitative analyses of the literature, and the development of insights related to emerging trends and future research directions. Our review began with a pool of 1251 papers collected through a variety of mechanisms. Through a structured screening process, we identified 61 English research papers employing HMDs to enhance the visual sense of people with visual impairments for more detailed analyses. Our analyses reveal that there is an increasing amount of HMD-based research on visual assistance and therapy, and there are trends in the approaches associated with the research objectives. For example, AR is most often used for visual assistive purposes, whereas VR is used for therapeutic purposes. We report on eight existing survey papers, and present detailed analyses of the 61 research papers, looking at the mitigation objectives of the researchers (assistive versus therapeutic), the approaches used, the types of HMDs, the targeted visual conditions, and the inclusion of user studies. In addition to our detailed reviews and analyses of the various characteristics, we present observations related to apparent emerging trends and future research directions. 

Embodied virtual agents serving as patient simulators are widely used in medical training scenarios, ranging from physical patients to virtual patients presented via virtual and augmented reality technologies. Physical-virtual patients are a hybrid solution that combines the benefits of dynamic visuals integrated into a human-shaped physical form that can also present other cues, such as pulse, breathing sounds, and temperature. Sometimes in simulation the visuals and shape do not match. We carried out a human-participant study employing graduate nursing students in pediatric patient simulations comprising conditions associated with matching/non-matching of the visuals and shape. 

Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR), e.g., based on monoscopic projected imagery on physical three-dimensional (3D) surfaces, can be particularly well-suited for ad hoc group or multi-user augmented reality experiences since it does not encumber users with head-worn or carried devices. However, conveying a notion of realistic 3D shapes and movements on SAR surfaces using monoscopic imagery is a difficult challenge. While previous work focused on physical actuation of such surfaces to achieve geometrically dynamic content, we introduce a different concept, which we call “Synthetic Animatronics,” i.e., conveying geometric movement or deformation purely through manipulation of the imagery being shown on a static display surface. We present a model for the distribution of the viewpoint-dependent distortion that occurs when there are discrepancies between the physical display surface and the virtual object being represented, and describe a realtime implementation for a method of adaptively filtering the imagery based on an approximation of expected potential error. Finally, we describe an existing physical SAR setup well-suited for synthetic animatronics and a corresponding Unity-based SAR simulator allowing for flexible exploration and validation of the technique and various parameters.