Towards Reverse Disability Simulation in a Virtual Environment

Disability Simulation (DS) is an approach used to modify attitudes regarding people with disabilities (PwD). DS places people without disabilities (PwoD) in situations that are designed for the users to experience a disability. The focus of my PhD dissertation is to transform the concept of disability simulation into reverse disability simulation (RDS) in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a RDS people with disabilities perform tasks that are made easier in the virtual environment compared to the real world. In a sense, RDS is the "ability" simulation for people with disability. Despite the fact that DS is being used to raise awareness, it also endured some criticism for not being effective. Our first and second study put the criticism into the test, and found out that DS, in fact, can be used as a tools to teach PwoD about facts regarding disability. This result encouraged us to think deeper and invent ideas how to use same concept of DS for PwD. In my third user study, we hypothesized that putting PwD in a RDS will increase confidence and enable efficient task completion. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a within-subjects experiment in which participants performed a virtual "kicking a ball" task in two different conditions: a normal condition without RDS (i.e., same difficulty as in the real world) and an easy condition with RDS (i.e., physically easier than the real world but visually the same). The results from our study suggest that RDS increased participants' confidence. The outcome of our finding has the potential to be used in VR rehabilitation for PwD.