Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CoMove) for Autism Spectrum Disorder Intervention

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized in part by core deficits in social interaction and communication. A collaborative virtual environment (CVE), which is a computer-based, distributed, virtual space for multiple users to interact with one another and/or with virtual items, has the potential to support flexible, safe, and peer-based social interactions. In this article, we presented the design of a CVE system, called CoMove, with the ultimate goals of measuring and potentially enhancing collaborative interactions and verbal communication of children with ASD when they play collaborative puzzle games with their typically developing (TD) peers in remote locations. CoMove has two distinguishing characteristics: (i) the ability to promote important collaborative behaviors (including information sharing, sequential interactions, and simultaneous interactions) and to provide real-time feedback based on users’ game performance; as well as (ii) an objective way to measure and index important aspects of collaboration and verbal-communication skills during system interaction. A feasibility study with 14 pairs—7 ASD/TD pairs and 7 TD/TD pairs—was conducted to initially test the feasibility of CoMove. The results of the study validated the system feasibility and suggested its potential to index important aspects of collaboration and verbal communication.