1st meeting

I had my first meeting with Chris earlier in the week but it’s taken me a couple of days to go thru’ the stuff we talked about.

We discussed how people with autism find it easier to relate to computers coz there’s no ambiguity of expression, how they tolerate rather than co-operate. I told him of one of the papers I read on an immersive project which said how beneficial the participants and their families found it and conversely another paper said how the participants only associated a particular action with the immersion environment which kinda defeated the object.

Something Chris said about a project or a demo of something where these kids hit a virtual ball between themselves, a bit like the Eye Toy, and collaborative working has got me thinking. If children with autism relate to computers and game consoles better than people, then would they co-operate with someone else via a computer? Second Life came up again – I really MUST get that working. It might be too complicated for some sufferers but it’s got the unambiguous of expression that would be useful. VRML came up which I had a dabble with years ago but got scared off but then again I didn’t really have a need to learn it unlike now.

Something that I must keep in mind is that I need to make sure that I can keep my distance and still be objective. I obviously have some emotional involvement in autism so it’s important that I don’t let that cloud any issues. Also, I shouldn’t look at it as “another month, another game” – don’t worry if that doesn’t make any sense to you, it does to me!!

So, what’s next? I still wanna visit a couple of immersive projects if only so I know what I don’t want to do if you see what I mean. I also wanna visit a couple special needs schools. If my core idea of making sure that this is as affordable as possible, I ought to see what they will think of it