Improve Accessibility of Virtual and Augmented Reality for People with Balance Impairments

Most people experience some imbalance in a fully immersive Virtual Environment (VE) (i.e., wearing a Head Mounted Display (HMD) that blocks the users view of the real world). However, this imbalance is significantly worse in People with Balance Impairments (PwBIs) and minimal research has been done to improve this. In addition to imbalance problem, lack of proper visual cues can lead to different accessibility problems for PwBIs (e.g., small reach from the fear of imbalance, decreased gait performance, etc.) We plan to explore the effects of different visual cues on peoples' balance, reach, gait, etc. Based on our primary study, we propose to incorporate additional visual cues in VEs that proved to significantly improve balance of PwBIs while they are standing and playing in a VE. We plan to further investigate if additional visual cues have similar effects in augmented reality. We are also developing studies to research reach and gait in VR as our future work.