HCC: Small: ProSocial: A 360-Degrees Video-based Virtual Reality Game Strengthening Social-emotional Skills with Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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People with developmental disabilities often suffer from deficits in social-emotional skills, including recognizing and managing emotions and maintaining conversations, that are crucial for education, work, and life successes. The overarching goal of the project is to employ participatory design methods to understand the methods for teaching and enhancing social-emotional skills of high-functioning individuals with developmental disabilities, such as those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This project also aims to co-design 360-degree video-based Virtual Reality environments with human actors with relevant stakeholders aimed at providing a realistic and practical learning environment for these individuals, thereby promoting transfer of skills from the virtual environment to real life scenarios they regularly encounter. The co-design process will include individuals with developmental disabilities and their families and professional caregivers. The goal of the virtual environments is to provide effective social-emotional skill training with minimal to no support from behavioral specialists. While the project focuses on individuals with developmental disabilities, the project research results can be used for society at large for a variety of behavioral and social skills training based on: 1) the lessons learned and the methods of participatory design for teaching and enhancing social-emotional skills and 2) the virtual environments depicting scenarios that are common in day-to-day interactions for most adults. The project also provides excellent opportunities for multidisciplinary education involving computer science, game design, human-computer interactions, and psychology.The project’s goal is to employ participatory design methods to understand the methods for teaching and enhancing social-emotional skills of high-functioning individuals with developmental disabilities such as those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The design requirement gathering methods include interviews with adults with developmental disabilities their family members, behavioral specialists, speech language pathologists, vocational and community support providers and psychologists, complemented with role-playing workshops involving common vocational and social interactions that are analyzed using Journey Mapping and Progression Mapping techniques. Two learning theories: Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), form the foundation of the project and inform the design of the Virtual Reality environments. From methodological point of view, society and scientific communities can learn from this project how the combination and modification of existing theories for assisting adults with developmental disabilities, such as ABA and CBT, may be used to promote social-emotional skill training for these adults in “safe” (virtual) environments. Another significant aspect of the project is the longitudinal study on the participants with alternating VR-based and role-playing workshop-based training. This innovative and comprehensive longitudinal study will help provide critical insights to understand: (a) whether the skills learned in virtual environments transfer to real-world scenarios; (b) how/whether VR-based training helps caregivers such as Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) to work better with people with developmental disorders.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.