Project progress 1

So far my progress has concentrated on researching the feasibility of the project.

I have investigated similar projects such as Mediate and have been reading research papers on the benefits that immersive environments have on children with learning difficulties not just suffers of autism. Whilst there seems to be the general opinion that these environments have a benefical impact on the child, there is a school of thought which questions the validity of this by asking if the child only associates the skills he has learnt to the environment he has learnt it in and consequently cannot transfer them. With this in mind, using the environment as a teaching aid might not be the best use for it, maybe as a place where the child can relax, experiment with technology and just generally play could be the better option.

In parallel with the above, I have also been exploring technology. My first thought was to make the space a big room where the child could just walk in and start doing things however following on from a meeting with Chris, I’ve now been looking into virtual environments such as Second Life and into the possibility of building my own. Second Life unfortunately just doesn’t run on my Mac. It starts and after a couple of minutes it hangs the entire computer so constructing my own environment might be the answer. I’ve experimented with coding a couple of VRML scripts and although it did seem quite hard I can see how a template could be built and used to form the basis of a virtual space.

As suggested, I had a chat with Katina about my idea. She really confirmed something that had been nagging me at the back of my mind with regard to association and the transference of new skills into the real world. A suggestion she gave me was to use the environment as a research tool. If one of the characteristics of autism is the inability to collaborate with other people then why not see if using the environment has any impact on that. If part of the problem is the ambiguity of the real world then perhaps in a virtual world where everything is straight and easier to understand that won’t be a problem. An interesting angle.

Finally, is this a good use of my skills? If I’m having to learn new tools and techniques, would it not be better to either use them in an area that I’m more familiar with or use tools and techniques that I am familiar with already to develop my project. The problem with that is, what I know is, arguably, phone based and as my quick research has shown, this is something that is beyond the scope of the majority of the suffers of autism unless the interaction with a phone is made easier – which could become my area of research.