Universidade Federal do Ceará
Mestrado e Doutorado em Ciências da Computação

Título:Enhancing Orientation and Mobility Skills for Persons with Visual Impairments through VR Games: Introducing the EdKit Unity Package

Data: 29/11/2024
Horário: 14h00
Local:  Google Meet (meet.google.com/vaf-dwej-xhk)

Resumo:

The integration of digital technologies, particularly Virtual Reality (VR) games, into Orientation and Mobility (OM) training, has shown significant potential in enhancing the rehabilitation process for People with Visual Impairments (PVI). These technologies offer immersive and interactive experiences that can foster greater autonomy and independence. However, VR games specifically designed for OM training are currently limited, and tools or code libraries to support their development are also scarce. To address this gap, this work presents ‘EdKit’, a custom Unity package that combines gestures, multimodal feedback, and in-game analytics to help integrate Left-Right Discrimination concepts into VR games for PVI. EdKit also supports OM analytics, which can be used to enhance the educational experience for both students and instructors. This package was also used to create three small VR minigames in order to fill gaps in its feature set. Overall, developers had a positive reception of EdKit, agreeing that it is a powerful package that makes implementation easier and more legible. However, the evaluation also revealed that EdKit is an advanced package with a challenging learning curve. Participants suggested that this could be mitigated by providing more code examples, learning resources, and implementing designer-friendly workflows.

Banca examinadora: