Learning About Autism Using VR

Abstract

This paper describes a project that was carried out at the University of Malta, merging the digital arts and information technologies. The project, ‘Living Autism’, uses virtual reality (VR) technologies to describe daily classroom events as seen from the eyes of a child diagnosed with autism. The immersive experience is proposed as part of the professional development program for teachers and learning support assistants in the primary classrooms, to aid in the development of empathic skills with the autism disorder. The VR experience for mobile technologies has also been designed in line with user experience (UX) guidelines, to help the user assimilate and associate the projected experiences into newly formed memories of an unfamiliar living experience. Living Autism, is framed within a 4-min audio-visual interactive project, and has been piloted across a number of schools in Malta with 300 participants. The qualitative results collected gave an indication that the project had a positive impact on the participants with 85% of them reporting that they felt they became more aware of the autistic children’s needs in the primary classroom.