Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Aug 10, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 10, 2023 - Oct 5, 2023
Date Accepted: Nov 5, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Co-Design of a Virtual Reality Multiplayer Adventure Game for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Feasibility Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Virtual Reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging on their support to multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of VR-based game environments for social skills training is still understudied and deserves the deployment of an inclusive design approach to ensure its acceptability by target users.
Objective:
We present the inclusive design process followed to develop the Zentastic VR Adventure Game to foster social skills training in adolescents with ASD and to investigate its feasibility as a training environment for adolescents.
Methods:
The VR game supports multiplayer training sessions involving small groups of adolescents and their therapists as facilitators. Adolescents with ASD and their therapists were involved in the design and in an explorative acceptability study of an initial prototype of the gaming environment, as well as on a later feasibility multi-session evaluation of the VR game final release.
Results:
The feasibility study demonstrated good acceptability of the VR game by adolescents and an enhancement of their social skills from the baseline to post training.
Conclusions:
The findings provide preliminary evidence of the benefits that VR-based games can bring to the training of adolescents with ASD and, potentially, other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.