Enhancement of a Virtual Reality Wheelchair Simulator to Include Qualitative and Quantitative Performance Metrics

ABSTRACT

The increasing importance of inclusive design and in particular accessibility guidelines established in the U.K. 1996 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has been a prime motivation for the work on wheelchair access, a subset of the DDA guidelines, described in this article. The development of these guidelines mirrors the long-standing provisions developed in the U.S. In order to raise awareness of these guidelines and in particular to give architects, building designers, and users a physical sensation of how a planned development could be experienced, a wheelchair virtual reality system was developed. This compares with conventional methods of measuring against drawings and comparing dimensions against building regulations, established in the U.K. under British standards. Features of this approach include the marriage of an electromechanical force-feedback system with high-quality immersive graphics as well as the potential ability to generate a physiological rating of buildings that do not yet exist. The provision of this sense of “feel” augments immersion within the virtual reality environment and also provides the basis from which both qualitative and quantitative measures of a building's access performance can be gained.

KEYWORDS:

• haptics
• physiological cost
• simulation
• virtual reality
• wheelchair

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for suggestions for improvements to this article as well as the following staff and former students within the Bioengineering Unit: Shweta Malhotra for setting up the NI heart rate testing, Phillipa Dall for her early design work on the platform, David Robb and William Tierney for their machining and assembly skills, John McLean for his electrical interconnect work, and Stan Floyd for building the power supply unit and general electrical supervision. The Extending Quality of Life EQUAL program (G/RM05416) provided funding, as did the University of Strathclyde RDF Fund.