Serious Game for VR Road Crossing in Special Needs Education

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can impair communication, social skills, living skills, and learning capabilities. Learning approaches usually differ between mainstream schools and special needs schools, to cater for the different learning processes of children with ASD. Besides the traditional classroom-based education, alternative technology and methods are explored for special needs education. One method is to train children with ASD using Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. Many prior works show the effectiveness of VR-based learning with varying degrees of success. Some children with ASD may face challenges to gain independent living skills. Their parents or guardians have to expend a significant amount of effort in taking care of children with ASD. It will be very helpful if they can have a learning opportunity to gain such living skills. In this research, we develop a VR serious game to train children with ASD one of the basic living skills for road crossing safely. The VR serious game operates on multiple types of platforms, with various user interaction inputs including the Microsoft Kinect sensor, keyboard, mouse, and touch screen. The game design and methodology will be described in this paper. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the learning effectiveness of the road crossing game, with very positive results achieved in the quiz and survey questionnaire after the gameplay.

A Lower Bound for Minimizing Waiting Time in Coexisting Virtual and Physical Worlds

“…As the integration of virtual and real worlds becomes more prevalent, competition for critical resources, such as time, inevitably intensifies. For instance, reference [1] illustrated how VR is employed to enhance life skills for autistic children by developing a serious game specifically designed to train them to cross streets safely. In such scenarios, it is crucial that the computation determining whether a real person collides with a VR vehicle is not excessively delayed, as prolonged retrieval of information from the virtual world could result in a loss of realism.…”

“…Intrinsically, the presented problem is an NP-hard total completion time minimization problem for multiple cooks; hence, n = 20 is a reasonable problem size that an exact algorithm, e.g., a branch-and-bound algorithm [28], can solve within a given time, e.g., 3600 seconds. Consequently, for the presented problem, most instances of 20 jobs cannot be optimally solved BB 1 within 100 million nodes. Furthermore, BB 2 cannot solve all the 20-job instances either.…”

“…In today's technologically advanced world, the integration of virtual and real environments in applications is increasingly common, which underscores the importance of effectively allocating resources between these two worlds. As technologies such as VR, MR, and AR become essential in areas like medical training, education, and surgical guidance, they highlight the critical need to manage resources across both virtual and real settings [1,2]. For example, Hsiao, et al [2] observed that the application of AR is based in the real world, as the Pokémon game requires access to the participants' location information in the real world and also requires participants to pay, yet many players are tirelessly enthusiastic.…”

Combined extended reality and reinforcement learning to promote healthcare and reduce social anxiety in fragile X syndrome: a new assessment tool and a rehabilitative strategy

“…A wide range of terms are commonly used to summarize different virtual reality and related technologies that represent simulated real worlds built through computers, mobile devices, and wearable devices (Chen and Geschwind, 2022 ; Tan et al, 2022 ). XR is an umbrella term that encompasses all categories of real and virtual environments.…”

Visualize and Learn Sorting Algorithms in Data Structure Subject in a Game-based Learning

“…A learning game, Sort Attack, simulates the execution processes of three types of sorting algorithms: insertion sort, selection sort, and bubble sort [16]. Virtual reality (VR) technology is able to provide immersive learning experiences with interactions and engagement with players [17]. It has good potential to help students provide further learning experience in acquiring the knowledge of sorting algorithms.…”