Wheelchair-VR Validation Study

A validation study of our Wheelchair-VR driving simulator has been completed. We set up an obstacle course on campus that volunteers had to traverse in order to assess their abiilty to control a powered wheelchair.

Obstacle course
Figure 1: Obstacle course [PNG]

It involved navigatng through a doorway, a slalom run, and reverse parking. Some participants were then randomly selected for training in wheelchair-rift - using an Oculus Rift, and others just using the Desktop monitor.

Using whelchair-rift with Oculus
Figure 2: Using whelchair-rift with Oculus [PNG]

A second run of the obstacle course then took place to assess any skill improvement in using a real chair. The results demonstrated that the group trained with the Oculus Rift had a significant improvement over the control and desktop groups. Full details can be found here:

John, N. W., Pop, S. R., Day, T. W., Ritsos, P. D., & Headleand, C. J. (2017). The Implementation and Validation of a Virtual Environment for Training Powered Wheelchair Manoeuvres. IEEE Transactions On Visualization and Computer Graphics. In Press.