Bionic vision is a rapidly advancing field aimed at developing visual
neuroprostheses ('bionic eyes') to restore useful vision to people who are
blind. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see'
when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices
necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate
on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision
lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we propose to embed
biologically realistic models of simulated prosthetic vision (SPV) in immersive
virtual reality (VR) so that sighted subjects can act as 'virtual patients' in
real-world tasks.