Events

February 2, 2022

In this talk we explore the special challenges of VR with regards to accessibility. In VR and more in general spatial computing, users find themselves entering the digital content through wearables, and interacting with content with their own body. This means that if they have any bodily limitation this limitation will carry on to VR. In some cases it might even mean they won’t be able to wear the headset. In this talk we also present some work done to deal with this challenge.Continue Reading Does VR Have an Accessibility Problem? | Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

December 8, 2021

Augmented reality (AR) technology creates new immersive experiences in entertainment, games, education, retail, and social media. AR content is often primarily visual and it is challenging to enable access to it non-visually due to the mix of virtual and real-world content. In this work, Jaylin and her coauthors identify common constituent tasks in AR by analyzing existing mobile AR applications for iOS, and characterize the design space of tasks that require accessible alternatives. Continue Reading Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible | Jaylin Herskovitz

November 19, 2021

Today, VR mainly relies on realistic visual feedback to provide an immersive experience that is only accessible to sighted people. Most VR applications are not accessible for people with visual impairments (including people who are blind and people with low vision), preventing them from benefiting from this important class of emerging technology. In this talk, I’ll describe my research collaborations with Microsoft, which focused on designing technologies to make VR accessible for people with visual impairments, as well as discussing design guidelines for accessible VR. Continue Reading Designing Technologies to Make Virtual Reality Accessible for People with Visual Impairments | Dr. Yuhang Zhao

September 29, 2021

We often think of AI as giving computers new abilities, but there is tremendous potential for AI to give people new abilities as well. In this talk, entitled “AI and New Abilities: Video Games for Blind Players”, Brian shows how AI can be used to power assistive technologies — specifically, how to make it possible for people who are blind to play video games, including evaluating and navigating virtual worlds.

Continue Reading XR Access Research Seminar | Dr. Brian Smith