VR Therapy: Multisensory Experience
Expert Interview
Date and time: May 15, 2017 15:05 h- 15:35h
Form: Phone Interview
Expert Profile:
Name - Michele Ricamato
Profession - Speech and Language Pathologist, works primarily with children with ASD, co-founder of Soaring Eagle Academy, a special education school
Introducing the project to Michele
-
Alex briefed Michele on our project and described our user and our two user observations
-
Alex pointed out that our user was more engaged in the HTC VIVE experience because he felt more control in the game. Michele said that she is not surprised by this result. An individual on the autism spectrum would have challenges with comprehension, understanding the intentions of others and sometimes sensory processing. These result in a compromised perception of the world, and one seeks to feel safe by gaining control over the environment. Having control over the environment also makes the experience easier to understand.
-
Michele said the immediate challenge she sees is that the meaning of the experience will be different for each individual. This meaning will depend on the individual user profile, their experiences and what they know about the world.
-
Michele suggests we start with things that most people would have meaning around and have had many repeated experiences of, such as going to a grocery store, or Target. Further examples within these experience include waiting in line, not being able to find a specific product.
Finding the right social experience for the user
On TherapyOS
-
Michele believes that the premises of VR therapy are flawed from a therapeutic standpoint. Social skills are very difficult to teach in a non-real life setting. Trying to bring social experiences into a virtual world would require a lot of novelty to be built in.
Suggestions for VR activities with Ethan
-
Michele suggests that having multiple players in the VR environment would allow us to add social interaction into a VR game we know Ethan already likes. One of the problems she has seen with games is that sometimes kids are so engrossed in the game that they are withdrawn from social experiences around that game.
-
Michele is glad that we started with a game that Ethan likes. She suggests we can build the social experience around it. For instance, having some interaction before and after the game where Ethan can share how the experience was. The social interaction need not be embedded in the VR itself.
-
Michele thinks that games with implied turns where the game ends unless some interaction is achieved are better over games where turns are explicit because children learn more intuitively when it is implied and there is a natural drive to do so.
-
In order to make an engaging application for individuals across the autism spectrum, Michele suggested us to consider factors such as creativity, level of freedom, use of language and visual representation and use of colorful animation. She mentioned that visual representations such as pictures and videos, as well as bright colored animation may be attractive for many children with ASD.
-
Michele suggested that a calming environment may be the easiest to generalize and would be suitable for many individuals with ASD
On social interaction
-
Michele says that a lot of social interaction is based on rhythm and timing, which people with ASD struggle with. At Soaring Eagle, there is music therapy where some music is first played and then paused, and children can add in to the music based on what they listen to.
Soaring Eagle Academy
-
Michele is open to us visiting Soaring Eagle. The school has 70 students aged between 3 to 21 years old.
-
Soaring Eagle has drama lessons where students role play with different props. There are real improv and play exercises which support the learning of timing, rhythm, turn-taking, pacing in social interactions, the learning of how to look at people and speak, and learning how and when to say the lines and enter the stage.
Clarification on terminology
-
An individual with autism spectrum disorder is the most appropriate term to use when describing our user. The definition of “high functioning” is not really clear, sometimes it just refers to being verbal, and does not have any implication on the cognitive ability of the individual. Therefore, it is better to include a description of the user and our own criteria for “high functioning individuals”.
