vrSocial

Abstract

Social communication frequently includes nuanced nonverbal communication cues, including eye contact, gestures, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. This type of communication is central to face-to-face interaction, but can be challenging for children and adults with autism. Innovative technologies can provide support by augmenting human-delivered cuing and automated prompting. Specifically, immersive virtual reality (VR) offers an option to generalize social skill interventions by concretizing nonverbal information in real-time social interactions. In this work, we explore the design and evaluation of three nonverbal communication applications in immersive VR. The results of this work indicate that delivering real-time visualizations of proximity, speaker volume, and duration of one's speech is feasible in immersive VR and effective for real-time support for proximity regulation for children with autism. We conclude with design considerations for therapeutic VR systems.