I think this is great confirmation of Dan Dennett's "becoming famous" model of consciousness, that various "threads", much like program threads, are happening and competing all of the time in the brain, and the ones that "become famous", i.e. a thread that can be seen or accessed by broad areas of the brain, is what is consciousness, i.e., a famous thread does not correspond to consciousness, but rather is consciousness.

In this case, the thread of the visual stimuli became only famous enough to control the subjects feet and so forth to help him avoid the obstacles, but did not become sufficiently famous to be recorded or reported by the subject as a "conscious experience". This is because the visual stimuli did get passed to the extrastriate visual cortical areas but not to the primary visual cortex.

So this perfectly fits Dennett's model: a signal becomes famous enough to control muscles, but, because of injury, does not become so famous (or so globalized a thread, in programming terms) that the subject is able to report an experience of it.

For my money, qualia does not exist. It is a remnant of Cartesian dualism that has no place in the 21st century. Here the subject did not "miss out" on some hocus pocus qualia, rather, the visual stimuli simply did not become famous enough to be able to be reported by him, but, it did become famous enough for him to be able to avoid the objects in his visual path.

Dennet 1; Dualist Philosophers 0

:-)