Application of virtual reality in human-centered design

Abstract

At McMaster University, more than 1000 first-year work on a design project that introduces them to a client from the community of people with visible and/or invisible disabilities. Since most of the challenges our client deal with relates to their environment, visiting our clients’ living and working spaces can provide lost of information to students. This was not possible to our students until last offering of the course where we created VR module that represents the space of our client. This VR project was developed through the last round of OEX-075-MCMA. As a result of this project, students could virtually visit the spaces of our clients and interact with some components of the space, such as wheelchair that the one of our clients uses. As a continuation of the project, we would like to expand the VR environment so we can address more diverse clients (with different types of challenges) and provide more opportunity for students to apply active observation techniques as part of their design thinking process and learn more about universal design. Training students on invisible disabilities is always very challenging and that is what we hope to achieve for this module of the project.