Mental Immersion in Virtual Reality Avatar (MIVRA)—Social Communication Rehabilitation Assistive Tool for Autism Children

Proposed mental immersion in virtual reality avatar provides interaction with autism children to improve their social communication that includes visual object recognition, speaking—speech gestures, and aural—responding to avatar. Autism children need to understand the basic activities for their day-to-day life. Using the 3D modeling tool such as Blender creates an animated 3D models avatar and interact with autism children to improve their social communication. Autism children with above social communication issues will be reduced and interaction of avatar will make the children to connect emotionally and reduce their unusual or repetitive gestures while interact with virtual reality-based avatar in the continuous rehabilitation process. Five children with mild level and two children with medium level of autism are considered for observation and the interaction with avatar improves the social communication of the children with autism. Simple objects the children used in their day to day were modeled (referred from special school curriculum book). Avatar interacts with the children about the objects. While interacting with avatar, children eye contact, gesture, and expressions will be promising compared to the traditional therapy with physical objects. Avatar walks in the virtual environment and does the interaction. Two children with medium autism find difficulty in using head-mount device (HMD). We replace the HMD with leap motion device, so that hand and head-free movement makes them to see and interact with virtual environment. Day-to-day objects they are seeing in the rehabilitation were modeled in realistic way, so they can connect their minds with the objects easily. We have created virtual classroom with avatar for the next level, so that avatar interacts with children such as rhymes and music. It stimulates the autism children mental state to connect to music in the virtual world which enhances their social world communication too.