A VR Intervention Based on Social Story™ to Develop Social Skills in Children with ASD

Abstract

Social interactions and communication play a crucial role in people’s lives. Those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially children, may have difficulties participating in social interactions. Such challenges can be characterised by displaying atypical behaviours and limited sharing intention in social settings. Sharing is an important part of social interaction, and a lack of awareness or limited willingness to share undermines the development of social skills. These characteristics may be related to the impaired theory of mind (ToM). This means that it is difficult to understand people’s wishes and feelings. A range of interventions have been created to help develop social communication skills. The Social Story™ intervention is one such example, and it provides clear visual narratives to explain social situations and concepts to help children with ASD. The narratives provide a mechanism to visually communicate typical communication behaviours. The social story intervention approach is book-based. As such, it is dependent on a reader to communicate well the concepts and demands a certain level with respect to the listener’s imagination capacity. With the limitation of the paper-based medium in mind, this work-in-progress paper outlines the steps, approach, and end application to translate the Social Story™ into a virtual reality (VR) experience. The Social Story™ experience in VR potentially offers a more interactive, immersive and flexible intervention.