Reflections on the Adoption of Virtual Reality-based Application on Word Recognition for Chinese Children with Autism

Abstract

Deficiency of attention and sensory overload have been well documented in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); yet attention impairments could preclude children from developing social, cognitive and literacy skills. On the other hand, To address this limitation, virtual reality (VR)-mediated instruction could provide an isolated and focused learning space where noises can be faded out and in turn facilitate the integration of additional visual and auditory cues, thus improve children's learning skills. Unfortunately, most of the prior works of VR-based applications had focused on constructing a safe controllable immersive environment to enable children with ASD to develop useful social and communication skills; published research along this path is even rare in mainland China, which motivates our on-going research. In particular, in this short paper, we report a qualitative observation of the acceptability of such an application in trials involving a twelve-year old boy with high-functioning autism (though is now in a public school) and his mother. Although it is their first encounter with such a technology, and both show high enthusiasm on it; but when it comes to its deployment, mixed results were obtained.