Work-In-Progress—Exploring VR Conference Navigation Employing Audio Cues

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than one billion people with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness worldwide in 2020. Due to recent COVID-19 safety measures, online events have moved to online platforms in order to maintain physical distancing. The transition towards online gatherings have shown gaps associated with technology and internet access, along with lacking accessibility, which has resulted in reactive responses to improve usability by adding captioning, compatibility with screen readers, and image captioning to cite some examples. However, traditional video conference lacks immersion and presence otherwise found in virtual reality (VR), for example Mozilla Hubs, Engage VR, AltspaceVR, and Virbela amongst others. Although these services and consumer-level hardware are becoming ubiquitous, there are still accessibility challenges to be met when designing VR experiences. In this work-in-progress paper we explore the design of an inclusive web-based VR application that simulates registering at a virtual conference and navigating to a presentation room. Our preliminary study focused on usability and engagement by inviting participants to experience the demo eyes closed. Our preliminary results show the audio cues were helpful to navigate the environment without visual feedback.