Gaze-Sensitive Virtual Reality Based Social Communication Platform for Individuals with Autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by core deficits in social communication and ability to understand others' non-verbal emotional cues. This can be attributed to their atypical eye-gaze patterns along with reduced fixation towards communicator's face during social communication. With technological progress, Virtual Reality (VR) augmented with peripherals such as, eye tracker can offer a promising complementary assistive platform for presenting various social situations to this target group along with quantification of one's task performance and measurement of gaze-related indices. This paper presents the design of a VR-based social communication platform augmented with technologically-enhanced eye-tracking facility as a proof-of-concept application. We measured one's performance score along with real-time synchronized gaze-related indices while one interacted with VR-based social tasks having both context-relevant verbal and non-verbal components of social interaction. The results of a usability study carried out in the Indian sub-continent with eight pairs of individuals with ASD and typically-developing individuals showed the potential of our system to have implications on one's task performance and gaze-related indices in response to virtual peer's emotional expressions. The implication of emotions on gaze-related behavioral and physiological indices shows the potential of using gaze-related indices as bio-markers of one's anxiety during social communication.