Immersive digital experiences to ease people withintellectual disability into new physical spaces

Virtual Reality (VR) has become a commodity experience for the general population, bringing down prices and generating functionality available to non-gaming community members, such as teachers and journalists. This research aims to discover how different modes of VR (video or virtual worlds) engage and assist people with intellectual disability (PID). People with ID often find communication and understanding easier when concrete examples and visual prompts are used. VR systems enable a whole new approach to concrete and visual experiences to practice everyday living situations in a safe environment. It is often thought that the experience of a headset and immersion will be overwhelming, however we have observed the opposite in early trials of a train station virtual world designed with the purpose to support PID to practice navigating the space [1]. They engaged with the experience and some were really skilled at using the controls. Between June 2016 and September 2017 we have run a series of observations of young adults with intellectual disability using head-mounted displays to experience a virtual world and/or immersive videos. Videos present a low barrier to entry, as they are very easy to capture, share and display on any smartphone paired with a simple VR viewer (eg. Cardboard). Virtual worlds present potential for interactive experiences and engage the user in decisions regarding way-finding, but they are costly to develop and can be difficult to operate depending on the controllers they require. The virtual world we trialed was a synthetic 3D game engine representing a railway station. The videos were of various spaces such as a house, the University’s campus, a dog park and a cafe. They were filmed with a 360 camera, from either a first-person view, or a next-to-first-person view, or a static view. Some of them presented elements of interactions such as gaze-actionable menus within the video, or gaze instructions from within the video. From an organization point of view, as evidence by feedback from support workers and managers of services who have observed our trials, both were shown to have outstanding potential in terms of training for life skills and reducing anxiety about upcoming travels in unfamiliar environments. We will share our findings in terms of usability, engagement, immersive experience, as well as appropriation at a service’s level. We will also present recommendations on formatting the content and interactive elements, as well as scaffolding the immersive experiences. Finally, we will share support worker’s insights on the many potential applications that they foresee for the technology.