Enhancing orientation and mobility skills for persons with visual impairments through VR games: introducing the EdKit unity package

Abstract

The integration of digital technologies, particularly Virtual Reality (VR) games, into Orientation and Mobility (OM) training, has shown significant potential to improve the rehabilitation process for People with Visual Impairments (PVI). These technologies offer immersive and interactive experiences that can foster greater autonomy and independence. However, VR games specifically designed for OM training are currently limited, and tools or code libraries to support their development are also scarce. To address this gap, this work presents ‘EdKit’, a custom Unity package that combines gestures, multimodal feedback and in-game analytics to help integrate Left-Right Discrimination concepts into VR games for PVI. EdKit also supports OM analytics, which can be used to enhance the educational experience for both students and instructors. This package was also used to create three minigames in order to fill the gaps in its feature set. Overall, developers had a positive reception for EdKit, agreeing that it is a package that makes implementation easier and more legible. However, the evaluation also revealed that EdKit is a package with a challenging initial learning curve. Participants suggested that this could be mitigated by providing more code examples, learning resources, and implementing designer-friendly workflows.