A FRAMEWORK FOR DESIGNING AN AUGMENTED REALITY APPLICATION FOCUSING ON OBJECT FUNCTION FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is the evolution of the concept of Virtual Reality (VR). Its goal is to enhance a person's perception of the surrounding world. Augmented reality techniques are often applied to facilitate understanding and create attractive educational and health tools. As such, augmented reality is deemed suitable to be implemented as one of the potential intervention methods as the treatment of autism in a fun environment. Hence, this study is aimed to develop a conceptual framework to design augmented reality applications based on object function to help in the communication of children with autism. The study framework will be developed based on vision-based object recognition. Object recognition has been used in many applications, especially in bio-imaging, industrial inspection, and robotic vision. The findings of this study will benefit autistic children in visual communication and indirectly help them to effectively link objects with their functions. This framework will then help designers to develop augmented reality applications suited to be an intervention tool that fits the need of autistic children.