Designing Upper-Body Gesture Interaction with and for People with Spinal Muscular Atrophy in VR

Abstract

Fig. 1. Twelve people with Spinal Muscular Atrophy designed upper-body gestures for VR commands. Two of them participated in person, while the other ten joined remotely. All participants actively took part in this research, and Participant 6 preferred to conduct the experiments without turning on the camera.Recent research proposed gaze-assisted gestures to enhance interaction within virtual reality (VR), providing opportunities for people with motor impairments to experience VR. Compared to people with other motor impairments, those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) exhibit enhanced distal limb mobility, providing them with more design space. However, it remains unknown what gaze-assisted upper-body gestures people with SMA would want and be able to perform. We conducted an elicitation study in which