An AI Guide to Enhance Accessibility of Social Virtual Reality for Blind People
This work addresses accessibility challenges for blind and low vision users in social VR, a growing but underserved domain, though it is currently a proposal without empirical validation.
The paper introduces an AI-powered guide with six personas to improve navigation, visual interpretation, and social interaction for blind and low vision users in social VR, addressing the limitations of human guides. No concrete results are reported as the work is at the proposal stage.
The rapid growth of virtual reality (VR) has led to increased use of social VR platforms for interaction. However, these platforms lack adequate features to support blind and low vision (BLV) users, posing significant challenges in navigation, visual interpretation, and social interaction. One promising approach to these challenges is employing human guides in VR. However, this approach faces limitations with a lack of availability of humans to serve as guides, or the inability to customize the guidance a user receives from the human guide. We introduce an AI-powered guide to address these limitations. The AI guide features six personas, each offering unique behaviors and appearances to meet diverse user needs, along with visual interpretation and navigation assistance. We aim to use this AI guide in the future to help us understand BLV users' preferences for guide forms and functionalities.