知乎折也
2024
by Jianan Johanna Liu, Yuqi Song, Danlin Huang

Overview

Foldiverse is an AR game-based solution that transforms paper folding into an interactive virtual life, specifically designed for children with autism. Recognizing the challenges parents face due to the lack of professional special education training, Foldiverse offers paper folding tutorials and real-time interactive feedback. This gamification approach not only stimulates children's interest but also enables parents to easily facilitate training at home. User experiments have demonstrated that Foldiverse significantly increases children's engagement and anticipation, offering a more gamified and family-inclusive method for autism rehabilitation.

Foldiverse’s Content Showcase

Foldiverse

Fold+diverse+universe
Create a diverse universe with paper folding.
通过折纸创造一个多样的世界。

Xiamen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital & Xiamen Xinbei Kindergarten 2024.5

Introduction

With the improvement of medical care and public awareness of autism, rehabilitation training for children with autism has received increasing attention. This rehabilitation training specifically includes three major modules: sensory intervention, language intervention, and behavioural intervention.

Research has shown that paper folding training has a significant positive impact on the behavioral intervention of children with autism. However, due to their limited attention span, children with autism often face challenges such as lack of motivation and difficulty in maintaining long-term paper folding training.

In hospitals or professional autism rehabilitation centres, therapists usually set up a variety of classroom games to mobilise children's interest, and gradually guide and motivate them to complete the training tasks. However, due to the global shortage of rehabilitation resources, some families of children with autism cannot afford the expensive treatment costs of hospitals and specialized institutions. Therefore, many families opt for home intervention. Parents of children with autism, lacking professional training in special education, encounter numerous problems when attempting home intervention, including:

Children unable to focus on paper folding training: The unique characteristics of children with autism make it difficult for them to concentrate on repetitive and monotonous training for long periods.

Parents unable to provide scientific guidance: Parents without professional knowledge cannot effectively guide their children through scientific lesson planning and designing training games.

Therefore, we attempt to utilize augmented reality (AR) technology to create a game application installed on wearable AR glasses. This application provides engaging origami tutorials and real-time feedback, gamifying the paper folding activity. With Foldiverse, parents do not need professional rehabilitation training knowledge or to design interesting games themselves to guide their children; they can simply accompany their children at home to complete paper folding training.

We propose two design strategies:

Interactive AR digital life: AR, as a new medium, provides fresh visual stimulation for children with autism. It offers gamified 3D paper folding tutorials, with the outcomes generating digital life forms that can interact with the children. This interactive experience gives children a sense of achievement and motivation, fostering a long-term positive training process.

Smart voice assistant Fofo: Fofo accompanies children throughout the game, providing professional and patient explanations. It uses vivid dynamics to continuously attract the children's attention and guides them to complete the training with positive language.

We recruited 12 families with children aged 3-7 with autism to participate in offline classes at the Xiamen Maternal and Child Health Hospital and evaluate the effectiveness of our solution. The study confirmed that Foldiverse can increase children's enthusiasm through gamified training and help parents of children with autism effectively accompany their children in rehabilitation training.

Our main contributions include:

Providing new possibilities for parents of children with autism to participate in intervention training: With scientifically designed tasks and professional teaching guidance in the game, parents can smoothly accompany their children in training without needing professional knowledge.

Enhancing the enthusiasm of children with autism through interactive AR: The interactive digital life stimulates the interest of children with autism in responding to and communicating with the outside world. This not only enhances the enthusiasm of children with autism in home training but also enriches traditional autism training classrooms.

Metadata

Media: Headworn AR
Technologies: Rokid Headset, Unity3D

Publication

Jianan Johanna Liu, Danlin Huang, Yuqi Song, Shan Luo, and Botao Amber Hu. 2024. Foldiverse: Augmenting Paper Folding Physiotherapy for Children with Autism via Family-Centered Mixed Reality Design. In Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY Companion ’24), October 14–17, 2024, Tampere, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3665463.3678823

BTW!
We won the Audience Choice Award in CHI PLAY 2024 Student Game Design Competition!🏆🏆

Other awards:

The 2nd ROKID AR Application Development Competition - Champion
The ROKID 2024 College AR Innovation Challenge - Champion
2024 CADA (Japan Concept Art Design Award) - Gold Award
2024 Mobile App Innovation Competition - Silver Award
2024 G Cross Award - Bronze Award
2024 Netherlands Art Design Competition - Bronze Award
2024 Hong Kong Contemporary Design Awards - Bronze Award

Exhibiting Experience:

UNITE 2024
Slash China 2024
CHI PLAY 2024
AIGC Digital Art Industry and Investment Development Seminar 2024