We ran our first VR workshop specifically for wheelchair users this week, giving two of our co-researchers a taste of virtual reality. You can see one of our researchers below using the Meta Quest Pro to explore one of the spaces:
The space that she looked at originally was a simple introductory space in the meata Quest Horizon worlds:
https://youtube.com/shorts/sERSt8JaApU
The VR workshops are guided by multiple, overlapping goals including the exploration of virtual spaces such as environments that wheelchair users would not be able to easily accomplish in the physical world, looking at some of the issues that accompany standard controllers that are supplied with the VR headsets and exploring ways of making VR more inclusive.
Wearing the headsets did not cause too much concern (although both are fairly heavy), as they are both adjustable and with reasonable padding. However, the controllers appeared to be difficult to hold and the buttons and joysticks hard to manipulate particularly if you have limited manual dexterity. In the video below, you can see that the controls on the VR controller need some improvement – something that we are currently working on.
After we had looked at a few of the virtual worlds (mostly from the set of Horizon worlds intstalled on the headset) we asked our researchers “If you could do anything in a virtual space, what would you choose to do?” The responses were interesting. One said she’d like to be ‘Michael Jackson’s hat for a day’ and experience what he sees on stage, and the other was a little more down to Earth, experiencing being in Kenya and possibly a VR cooking experience which she talks about in the video below:
