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Accessibility of Virtual Reality for Persons with Disabilities

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Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games

Synonyms

Accessibility; Games; Rehabilitation; Virtual reality

Definition

Immersive virtual reality – i.e., completely blocking out the real world through a virtual reality display – is not currently universally usable or accessible to many persons with disabilities, such as persons with balance impairments.

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) has traditionally been too expensive for the consumer market, which has constrained its applicability to high cost applications, such as soldier training, surgical training, and psychological therapy. However, with the decreasing costs of head mounted displays (HMD) and real-time tracking hardware, VR may soon be in homes all over the world. For example, HMDs such as the Oculus Rift (https://www.oculus.com/) for VR and Microsoft’s upcoming Hololens (https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/) for augmented reality (AR) will change the way that users play games and experience the surrounding real world, respectively. Moreover, VR and AR can now...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    John Quarles

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  1. John Quarles
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Correspondence to John Quarles .

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  1. Newton Lee Laboratories, LLC, Tujunga, California, USA

    Newton Lee

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Quarles, J. (2015). Accessibility of Virtual Reality for Persons with Disabilities. In: Lee, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_68-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_68-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-08234-9

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