VR Therapy: Multisensory Experience

The advent of Virtual Reality (VR) technology has made possible the immersive interaction in a computer-generated environment. Our client TherapyOS believes that such immersive interaction in VR could be useful for therapy for ASD. In this project, we focused on sensory integration difficulties people on the autism spectrum tend to experience. Through user observation and testing with different VR technologies, and consulting ASD experts, we developed a multisensory VR experience that is engaging and enjoyable for our user. Our final design is built as a first step to test and explore how VR can be applied in autism therapy.

 

We built our prototype using a VR application for three-dimensional drawing. This gave the user freedom to express his creativity and intuitively interact with the environment we built. Our prototype is composed of three different VR sensory experience “rooms”, each of which engage the user through tactile, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic means. The multisensory engagement made the overall VR experience engaging and enjoyable, and could in the future allow for more therapeutic functions that develops our user’s level of sensory integration. The design and research we present here serves as a single-user case study that TherapyOS can draw key insights from as they develop more sophisticated VR applications for autism therapy.

 

We were able to build a VR application that is multisensory, engaging and enjoyable for our user. Our main recommendations for future developments are to improve the sense of touch in VR, and conduct further user testing to establish users’ sensory needs for a wider demographic.