Design of a Virtual Reality Tour System for People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities: A Case Study

This study focuses on VR as a form of therapy for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs). The research aim is to develop an immersive and interactive VR system that is tailored for IDD individuals, for which most currently available VR experience systems are not optimized. Being intimately familiar with a place through an interactive VR tour will help alleviate social anxiety—very provident to IDD individuals. Accordingly, we create a hotspot-based VR tour system, which can provide an almost lifelike experience of visiting and learning about the location. We have conducted experiments with nondisabled individuals, acting as the control group, and IDD individuals, acting as the experimental group, to evaluate the tour system and compare the results between two groups. Our experiments show that the VR tour has a positive impact on the IDD individuals. In this article, we present the design of our VR tour system and its evaluation results.