MR System to Promote Social Participation of People Who Have Difficulty Going Out

7th International Conference, ITAP 2021, Held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021, Virtual Event, July 24–29, 2021, Proceedings, Part IIThis paper proposes a promotion system of social participation for people who have difficulty in going out with mixed reality collaboration technique. More than one billion population in the world are tortured by disabilities, and a majority of them have difficulties in social participation due to the unsatisfied transportation demanding. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to use a remote collaboration system based on mixed reality to help people with disabilities to join in social activities. Specifically, our system employs a pair of VR and AR HMDs as well as a 360∘ camera to create a virtual environment, where physically separated users can interact with each other immersively. Furthermore, we also equip our system with a branch of functions which can further facilitate the communications. In order to test our system, we also design a remote shopping scenario to simulate the condition where people with disabilities want to go shopping at home. The user study shows that our system can satisfy most requirements without triggering obvious discomfort