Social MatchUP: Collaborative Games in Wearable Virtual Reality for Persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Our research explores game play in Wearable Collaborative Virtual Environments (WCVEs) to provide new forms of treatment for persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) that complement traditional methods of intervention. We investigate this issue using the Social MatchUP (SMUP) application as a case study. SMUP provides a set of games in WCVEs that have been co-designed with NDD experts and aim at improving communication skills. In SMUP, multiple users wearing a Virtual Reality visor play together to accomplish collaborative tasks that take place in shared virtual environments and require talking to each other to be completed. The paper presents an exploratory empirical study devoted to evaluate the potential of SMUP games for persons with NDD to improve their speech-based conversational capability. We organized participants (24 persons with NDD) in 2 groups, one playing a game in SMUP and one playing a similar game in the real world, and assessed likability, usability, and a number of conversational performance metrics. Our results indicate that the game experience in SMUP was usable and enjoyable, and boosted higher conversational skills with respect to its counterpart in the physical setting.