Blindness remains one of the most impairing disabilities worldwide, profoundly affecting independence, social participation, and quality of life. While assistive technologies offer partial support, they do not restore visual function. Retinal prostheses represent a promising avenue for vision restoration in cases of incurable retinal blindness. However, current clinical devices provide only limited visual input, insufficient for independent mastery of daily life. A new generation of wide-field retinal implants aims to overcome key limitations by combining broader visual fields with higher resolution. Yet, the functional benefits of these advancements remain unclear, particularly in complex, real-world contexts.

This thesis addresses this gap in knowledge by evaluating the everyday usefulness of wide-field artificial vision using simulated artificial vision (SAV) in immersive virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) environments. Sighted participants wore a VR headset that displayed the visual experience of a blind person implanted with a retinal prosthesis. The simulation was based on the physiological properties of the photovoltaic wide-field retinal implant POLYRETINA and was tested in ecologically valid settings. First, a VR-based experiment investigated the phenomenon of perceptual fading that characterizes artificial vision in some prosthetic approaches and forces users to engage in effortful head scanning to maintain visual perception. The study suggested that electrode stimulation strategies, such as interrupted pulse trains and randomized stimulus durations, can significantly reduce this burden by stabilizing phosphene visibility and reducing required head movements, thereby enhancing comfort and usability. Second, building on this strategy, an AR study conducted in a naturalistic urban environment assessed participants' ability to perform everyday tasks - such as navigating unfamiliar streets, mailing a letter, or using an ATM - under SAV with varying fields of view. The results demonstrated that increasing the visual angle from 20° to 45° substantially improved task efficiency, spatial awareness, and learning over time, while visual angles beyond 45° yielded diminishing returns. Third, a social VR experiment further examined how this wider visual field size affects social perception. Participants engaged in tasks involving person identification, spatial localization, and interpretation of social attributes in a simulated medical scenario. The findings revealed that a wider visual field significantly improved decision-making speed and the ability to detect and integrate socially relevant cues, particularly in uncrowded indoor settings.

Together, these results suggest that wide-field prosthetic vision offers meaningful functional advantages across critical domains of daily life. Moreover, they underscore the value of combining immersive VR/AR with biologically plausible simulations as a scalable, ethically sound framework for pre-clinical evaluation. Ultimately, this work advances the field toward not merely restoring sight but enabling artificial vision that supports autonomy in daily life.