Exploring the Potential of Virtual Reality for the Elderly and People with Disabilities
Felix Kamieth, Patrick Dhne, Reiner Wichert, Juan Luís, Viveca Jiménez-Mixco, Antonella Arca, María Teresa · Virtual Reality · 2010
Virtual Reality 396 solutions involve complex features such as ubiquity, context awareness, smartness, adaptiveness and computing embedded in daily life goods.The continuous advance of ICT is gradually increasing the ability of the E&D to perform daily activities independently, decreasing the amount of effort required for completing sensitive tasks.In this sense, Virtual Reality (VR) -at a broader scope, Virtual & Mixed Reality (VMR)-is growing to become a very useful tool for the empowerment of a large number of people.The potential usefulness of VR for these persons were already summarised in four main points almost two decades ago (Lanier, 1992;Middleton, 1992):It offers them the possibility to perform tasks and experience situations that they might not otherwise because of any physical or cognitive limitation, since VR can transform the sensory information that they cannot perceive into other modalities.• VR can present a world where people may learn in a simplified way, applying afterwards the skills acquired to more complex real environments.• VR technologies can be adapted to a wide range of individual senses and capabilities of the user.E.g. blind users can receive more audio information; visual information can be reinforced for deaf users, etc.Also, individual abilities of the users can be assessed so that the adaptation is optimal for them.• VR allows people with special needs to interact with other users in the same conditions.At present, costs of emerging VR technologies are being constantly reduced while becoming adaptable to a wider range of environments and individual requirements.Therefore they may offer significant opportunities to support user interaction in technological environments, while helping to reduce the existing usability gaps.As a consequence, VR has become the central research issue for a new generation of technologies that may be used to help E&D.Since many years, the two research groups responsible of this book chapter -Fh-IGD and LST-UPM-have been advancing in the potential of ICT to overcome access limitations to environments and services, particularly addressing the convergence of VR, domotics and accessibility.As a natural step in this collaborative process, both groups are exploring the convenient application of VR technologies in the process of designing and developing accessible solutions for the E&D.An overview of this complementary work is depicted below.