Immersive tele-guidance towards evoking empathy with people who are vision impaired
Renan Guarese, Debra Polson, Fabio Zambetta · 2023
We propose a novel approach to promote empathy with people that have disabilities through the development of an asymmetric collaborative experience. Our research aims to enable visually impaired (VI) users to relay their current surroundings to a remote sighted collaborator using virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR). The proposed system allows for the transmission of in-situ spatial information from the perspective of a VI user wearing an AR headset to a remote sighted guide wearing a VR headset, for the purpose of tele-guidance (TG). We aim to enhance the state empathy between VI and sighted users sharing the same environment by enabling them to exchange ideas and collaborate on tasks. Based on similar research in cross-reality collaboration, we expect the proposed system to allow remote guides to gain a better spatial understanding of the environment by immersing them in its digital twin. Additionally, VI users may find our system to be less time-consuming in their current environment when compared to current TG systems, which are solely based on video and voice chat.