This project explores a high-speed network-enabled, immersive, and smart virtual reality application, called vSocial, to connect children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from different geographical regions for online social training. The 2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) suggests that 1 in 45 children (>2%) have been diagnosed with ASD. Children with ASD are characterized by impairments in social skills, which can result in low quality of life, bringing emotional, financial, and physical stress and burden on the children, families, schools, and society. This project builds on project team's work during the past five years within which we have successfully developed and evaluated a social competence intervention (SCI) curriculum and a computer-based virtual learning application called iSocial. The iSocial application makes the face-to-face SCI curriculum available online to youth with ASD and public schools, who would otherwise, due to geographical and personal limitations, have no access to such programs provided by experts.
vSocial will use an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) medium for application delivery over high-speed networking infrastructures at schools as well as cloud technologies available within Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) Racks. Such a transformation will allow us to study how end-to-end network performance tuning needs to be orchestrated across multi-provider paths and how to troubleshoot last-mile network bottlenecks (e.g., at schools or homes) for field-deployment of demanding gigabit applications such as vSocial. Specifically, (a) it will bridge the knowledge generalization gap between online social training and real-world social skills for students with ASD through use of a networked immersive VR system. (b) It will provide smart sensing capabilities for effective monitoring and tracking of the cognitive-affective states of student learners at remote ends for early individualized pedagogical interventions and outcome assessment. Through vSocial application prototype experimentation in the field (at actual schools with teachers and students involvement), this project will investigate the use of cognitive-affective sensing for online social training in education of students with ASD, use of VR glasses, and Unity3D VR content creation platform to assess immersive learning experience.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
