Virtual reality project can boost confidence of new wheelchair users
A group of designers has made a virtual reality system that lets people push a real wheelchair through a virtual world. Fjord, a design and innovation consulting company, began the system as an “empathy project” with the intent of giving the non-disabled a peek at the world that wheelchair users interact with, before quickly realizing there was a more practical application for the technology.
By Seth McBride, New Mobility September 19, 2017
Anyone who uses a wheelchair can remember how disorienting and difficult it was to navigate the outside world for the first time in a chair. With this VR system, the newly-disabled may soon have a stress-free option to start learning the skills needed to tackle all the obstacles that a normal trek through the city presents to a wheelchair user. Hopefully, when they venture outside of a rehab setting for the first time, they can do so with some confidence.
The design team was inspired to begin their project after watching When I Walk, the film by documentarian, accessibility innovator and New Mobility’s 2014 Person of the Year, Jason DaSilva.
Jason DaSilva’s award-winning film, When I Walk, raised awareness of what it is like to live with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. Charlie Samuels photo
Check out this two-and-a-half-minute video on this cool emerging technology. And keep doing what you do Jason, you never know what ripples your work is going to create.
| Fjord Makeshop: Combining Empathy and Virtual Reality for Wheelchair Users from Fjord on Vimeo. At Fjord, we’re always focused on human impact when we design services and experiences. In our Makeshop, we’ve been experimenting with ways that virtual reality (VR) can facilitate empathy to help people better understand unfamiliar situations. There is a definite challenge with this, however, as VR can often trivialize experiences by turning them into a game of sorts. Our mission was to overcome this obstacle and, through our Design Study process, find a way to apply VR and immersive experiences to create more understanding for the unknown – in this case, using a wheelchair. Uploaded to Vimeo April 20, 2017 |
Source New Mobility
