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PhD Forum: Strengthening Social Emotional Skills for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities Through Virtual Reality Games

Defining qualities of developmental disabilities include deficits in social-emotional skills, especially with respect to emotion recognition. This study aims to assist adults with developmental disabilities in strengthening emotion recognition skills through the research and development of virtual reality games to increase accessibility to life-changing therapies. Work previously accomplished in this study includes the development of EmotionVR, a virtual reality game created for the HTC Vive. EmotionVR takes traditional methods of therapy aimed at teaching emotion recognition and translates it into an interesting and interactive narrative that provides users the opportunity to learn and practice emotion recognition in realistic settings. This work observed and analyzed the interaction between adults with developmental disabilities, and the HTC Vive and virtual environments. While the game supports the idea that virtual reality is a feasible method of providing such therapies, users found some discomfort with using the HTC Vive, and had slight difficulty translating what they had learned from the game in different situational contexts. To resolve those issues, we investigate interactions between adults with developmental disabilities and other virtual reality systems, and develop a 360 video based virtual reality game to assist with transfer of skills.