"I Built It!" — Exploring the effects of customizable virtual humans on adolescents with ASD

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) training games have many potential benefits for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) therapy, such as increasing motivation and improving the abilities of performing daily living activities. Persons with ASD often have deficits in hand-eye coordination, which makes many activities of daily living difficult. A VR game that trains hand-eye coordination could help users with ASD improve their quality of life. Moreover, incorporating users' interests into the game could be a good way to build a motivating game for users with ASD. We propose a Customizable Virtual Human (CVH) which enables users with ASD to easily customize a virtual human and then interact with the CVH in a 3D task. Specifically, we investigated the effects of CVHs with a VR hand-eye coordination training game - Imagination Soccer - and conducted a user study on adolescents with high functioning ASD. We compared the differences of participants' 3D interaction performances, game performances and user experiences (i.e. presence, involvement, and flow) under CVH and Non-customizable Virtual Human (NCVH) conditions. The results indicate that CVHs could effectively improve performance in 3D interaction tasks (i.e., blocking a soccer ball) for users with ASD, motivate them to play the game more, and offer a better user experience.