Seeing Through Interaction: Supporting Visually Impaired Users with Immersive VR Museum Experiences

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Visually impaired people face obstacles in accessing activities that depend heavily on vision and may involve physical constraints. Although assistive technologies are available, they rarely address the needs of people with residual vision who wish to exploit their visual abilities. Virtual reality (VR) offers opportunities in this direction. This paper presents an immersive VR system designed to provide museum experiences for visually impaired users. Developed in collaboration with domain experts, the system combines a virtual environment with interaction techniques. Gesture recognition and voice commands support spatial awareness and object interaction, while enhanced visualizations highlight details that are difficult to perceive. To verify the suitability of the proposed method, an exploratory usability study involving 14 participants with severe low vision was carried out. The evaluation combined the System Usability Scale (SUS) and a post-experience interview, showing well perceived usability, engagement, and positive user acceptance.