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VIRTUAL REALITY GIVES STUDENTS A FEEL FOR LIVING WITH A DISABILITY

May 9, 2000

Research and anecdotal evidence show children and young adults are generally open-minded about their peers with disabilities, but how well do they truly understand what it is like to attend school in a wheelchair or with other mobility challenges? A new web site from the University of Ottawa's Virtual Reality Lab gives students a virtual taste of the reality their friends and classmates face.

At the site, developed by Joan McComas and Jayne Pivik, visitors can take "The Awareness Challenge," a 3-D computer graphics tour of a virtual school. The program functions like a video game, with the player viewing the rooms from the perspective of a student sitting in a wheelchair. The user is prompted to search different areas of the school and identify evidence of problems in the way the building or a room is set up as well as problems related to how students with disabilities are perceived by others. "The Awareness Challenge" can be used online at the VR Lab site or downloaded free for use on a classroom or home computer.

"The Awareness Challenge" is designed "to teach school children and their teachers without a disability about the structural and attitudinal barriers faced by their peers with mobility limitations," Pivik and McComas say on the VR Lab web site.

The developers got help from local schools, public agencies and organizations and Nortel Networks to create the program. Fifteen students and a handful of educators from Corpus Christi School and Stittsville Public School in Ottawa, along with members of the Ottawa Children's Treatment Centre, acted as the project's Disability Awareness Consultants. They helped identify and prioritize the barriers currently apparent in mainstream classrooms and other school settings, then they helped test the program in local schools.

According to the researchers, children in the test group that used the barriers program emerged with more knowledge and understanding of challenges students with disabilities face than their peers who used a virtual reality program that did not address barrier issues. Those who received the barriers program said it helped them recognize problems they had not previously considered and understand how it feels to be teased or mocked because of a disability, the researchers said. The students in that test group also said they could better understand the challenge of maneuvering a wheelchair in close spaces and the strengths and capabilities of students who use wheelchairs.

"Technological advances, including the use of virtual reality, have contributed enormously to improving the treatment, training, and quality of life of children with disabilities," McComas, Pivik and research associate Marc LaFlamme said in a paper describing the project. Through its awareness-building power, virtual reality programs like "The Awareness Challenge" can help students with disabilities as well, the researchers argue. They concluded that virtual reality can "minimize the effects of a disability" by assisting in training and skills enhancement and improving "social participation and the [disabled] child's quality of life."

McComas, Laflamme, Pivik and their colleagues at the Virtual Reality Lab are conducting other studies of the benefits of virtual reality in education, including a project studying its effectiveness for improving spatial skills in children who use a wheelchair.8