Virtual reality technology is biased. It excludes approximately 95% of the world's population by being primarily designed for male, western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic populations. This bias may be due to the lack of diversity in virtual reality researchers, research participants, developers, and end users, fueling a noninclusive research, development, and usability cycle. The objective of this article is to highlight the minimal virtual reality research involving understudied populations with respect to dimensions of diversity, such as gender, race, culture, ethnicity, age, disability, and neurodivergence. Specifically, we highlight numerous differences in virtual reality usability between underrepresented groups compared to commonly studied populations. These differences illustrate the lack of generalizability of prior virtual reality research. Lastly, we present a call to action with the aim that, over time, will break the cycle and enable virtual reality for everyone.
Many people with visual impairments actively play soccer, however the task of making the game accessible is met with significant challenges. These challenges include: the need to constantly talk to signify location and detecting the positions of silent objects on the field. Our work aims to discover methods to help persons with visual impairments play soccer more efficiently and safely. The proposed system uses headphone-rendered spatial audio, an on-person computer, and sensors to create 3D sound that represents the objects on the field in real-time. This depiction of the field will help players to more accurately detect the locations of objects and people on the field. The present work describes the design of such a system and discusses perceptual challenges. Broadly, our work aims to discover ways to enable people with visual impairments to detect the position of moving objects, which will allow them to feel empowered in their personal lives and give them the confidence to navigate more independently.
Currently available augmented reality systems have a narrow field of view, giving users only a small window to look through to find holograms in the environment. The challenge for developers is to direct users’ attention to holograms outside this window. To alleviate this field of view constraint, most research has focused on hardware improvements to the head mounted display. However, incorporating 3D audio cues into programs could also aid users in this localization task. This paper investigates the effectiveness of 3D audio on hologram localization. A comparison of 3D audio, visual, and mixed-mode stimuli shows that users are able to localize holograms significantly faster under conditions that include 3D audio. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the use of 3D audio in localization tasks using augmented reality systems. The results provide a basis for the incorporation of 3D audio in augmented reality applications.
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