Improving museum accessibility through storytelling in wearable immersive virtual reality

Our research aims at helping people with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) enjoy the experience with artistic or cultural artefacts while visiting museums. We adopted a digital storytelling approach that exploits Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (WIVR) technology and the social story method. A social story is a short textual and visual narrative that describes a social situation of everyday life using visuals (and text) on paper sheets. This method is widely used in interventions for persons with NDD (particularly autism) to help them gain an accurate understanding of social situations, develop autonomy and learn appropriate behaviour. The paper describes how the traditional concept of social story can evolve when the narrative is implemented using a different medium (virtual reality) and a different interaction paradigm (pointing with head movements). We present the concept of Wearable Immersive Social Stories (WISS for short) and describe the design process-performed in collaboration with NDD experts-That led to the definition of WISS and to the development of new technological tools.