ACM TACCESS Special Issue on Adaptive Inclusive AR/VR Systems

In recent time, both artificial intelligent and interactive systems made tremendous progress. We can use AR and VR technologies in smartphones and can download software code to train complicated convolutional neural networks for face or any specific object detection. This special issue on Adaptive Inclusive AR/VR Systems is planning to take a novel approach to bring these latest developments in computing technologies for users, who often miss out advantages in information technology due to their limited range of abilities. Earlier research already explored the use of AR/VR technologies for navigation and rehabilitation. In the present Covid 19 pandemic situation, online training and electronic learning platforms turned too important. Teaching and learning of science can take on a whole new dimension with AR/VR technologies. Immersive learning has proven to be very beneficial in the case of learning new languages, an area of great difficulty for children with learning disabilities. Gamification and interactivity will improve student engagement and learning outcome. While VR and full immersion still require high end computing stations in the form of high-end smartphone, wearable headsets and high-end graphics processing units, low-cost optical and video see through interfaces are easier to scale up to large population. However, like any other technology, large scale adoption of AR/VR technology requires it to be intuitive, easy to use and maintain and adding new values compared to traditional interactive systems. This special issue aims to bring together research papers on AR/VR and accessibility applications together and explore innovative ways to produce immersive inclusive content for education and ICT applications.

The special issue was planned during a CHI 21 (ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors) workshop on Adaptive Accessible AR/VR Systems (https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3411763.3441324). The workshop was attended by researchers from leading academia and industry and aimed to

While the effort on making inclusive AR/VR systems is still on through multiple research groups and their sponsored projects, this special issue highlighted research from a wide range of topics across different geographic regions covering 7 countries in 3 continents. We received 16 submissions in total and 5 papers were accepted after double blind review by eminent reviewers and members of editorial team. The average turnaround time by editors was 98.6 days.

The five accepted papers covered a wide range of abilities including AR/VR solutions for mobility impairment, game design for enhancing cognitive abilities and a scoping review of head mounted displays for people with visual impairment. Yamagami and colleagues at Microsoft Research (Two-In-One: A Design Space for Mapping Unimanual Input into Bimanual Interactions in VR for Users with Limited Movement) explored the limitations of standard interaction techniques in VR for users with mobility impairment and proposed a design space to adapt bimanual interaction for people with limited range of hand movement. Sharma and colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science (Comparing two safe distance maintenance algorithms for a gazecontrolled HRI involving users with SSMI) proposed an eye gaze controlled robotic arm for rehabilitation of users with severe speech and motor impairment and described a Markov Decision Process based algorithm to maintain safe distance of the robotic manipulator from users’ arms. Duval and colleagues at University of California, Santa Cruz (Designing Spellcasters: Immersive Virtual Reality Stroke Rehabilitation from Clinician Perspectives) adapted a general-purpose VR game for stroke rehabilitation and shared clinicians' perspectives. Williams and a collaborative team from Purdue University, University of California, San Diego and University of Florida, Gainesville presented Meta-Cogs - An intervention involving VR and a robot to improve executive function for people with cognitive impairment. Finally, Li and colleagues at University of Central Florida (A Scoping Review of Assistance and Therapy With Head-Mounted Displays for People Who Are Visually Impaired) reviewed more than 1000 papers and highlighted present scopes of AR and VR research for people with visual impairment.

Overall, this special issue created pointers for future research trends for accessible AR/VR systems with representative case studies on visual, cognitive and mobility impaired users. Future effort will continue collating new use cases in personalized and inclusive AR/VR research through organizing workshops and similar special issue of ACM TACCESS.