Objective. Retinal prostheses hold the potential for artificial vision in blind patients suffering from outer retinal dystrophies. The optimal number, density and coverage of the electrodes that a retinal prosthesis should have to provide adequate artificial vision in daily activities is still an open question and an important design parameter needed to develop better implants. Approach. To address this question, we investigated the interaction between the visual angle, the pixel number and the pixel density without being limited by a small electrode count. We implemented prosthetic vision in a virtual reality environment in order to simulate the real-life experience of using a retinal prosthesis. We designed four different tasks simulating: object recognition, word reading, perception of a descending step and crossing a street. Main results. The results of our study showed that in all the tasks the visual angle played the most significant role in improving the performance of the participant. Significance. The design of new retinal prostheses should take into account the relevance of the restored visual angle to provide a helpful and valuable visual aid to profoundly or totally blind patients.

客观的。视网膜假体具有为患有外层视网膜营养不良的盲人提供人工视觉的潜力。视网膜假体在日常活动中提供足够人工视觉所需的电极的最佳数量、密度和覆盖范围仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，也是开发更好的植入物所需的重要设计参数。方法。为了解决这个问题，我们研究了视角、像素数和像素密度之间的相互作用，而不受小电极数的限制。我们在虚拟现实环境中实施了假体视觉，以模拟使用视网膜假体的真实体验。我们设计了四种不同的模拟任务：物体识别、单词阅读、下台阶感知和过马路。主要结果。我们的研究结果表明，在所有任务中，视角对提高参与者的表现起着最重要的作用。意义. 新的视网膜假体的设计应考虑到恢复的视角的相关性，以便为深度失明或完全失明的患者提供有用且有价值的视觉辅助。