A system to study 3D perception for diagnosing schizophrenia and assessing treatment results

Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) perceive various visual stimuli differently than healthy controls. This is especially true of the “hollow-face illusion.” We have created a virtual rendering system that exploits this well-known fact. We also explain the addition of a head-tracking feature that provides a more realistic spatio-temporal interaction for our virtual-reality apparatus. Our system is capable of quantifying the amount of time a person perceives the illusion and affords a comparison between SZ patients and controls, thus offering a diagnostic tool for SZ.