I-Interact: A Virtual Reality Serious Game for Eye Contact Improvement for Children with Social Impairment

Eye contact is among the most substantial yet underrated non-verbal social communicative behaviors. Establishing and maintaining eye contact is quite challenging for children affected by social impairment. As a solution, we propose a virtual reality serious game to help improve eye gaze abilities for these children and facilitate the transfer of the acquired skills to real-world social interactions. The project comprised of the design, implementation and evaluation of a three levels game that emphasizes on different aspects of eye contact. According to the evaluation carried out in this research, a virtual reality gaming context is a promising strategy for gaze development of children with social deficiencies.