SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to People with Low Vision Yuhang Zhao∗ Edward Cutrell Christian Holz Cornell Tech, Cornell University Microsoft Research Microsoft Research New York, New York Redmond, Washington Redmond, Washington
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Meredith Ringel Morris Eyal Ofek Andrew D. Wilson Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Microsoft Research Redmond, Washington Redmond, Washington Redmond, Washington
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Current virtual reality applications do not support people Yuhang Zhao, Edward Cutrell, Christian Holz, Meredith Ringel who have low vision, i.e., vision loss that falls short of Morris, Eyal Ofek, and Andrew D. Wilson. 2019. SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to complete blindness but is not correctable by glasses. We People with Low Vision. In CHI Conference on Human Factors present SeeingVR, a set of 14 tools that enhance a VR in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, application for people with low vision by providing visual Glasgow, Scotland Uk. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. and audio augmentations. A user can select, adjust, and https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300341 combine different tools based on their preferences. Nine of our tools modify an existing VR application post hoc via 1 INTRODUCTION a plugin without developer effort. The rest require simple Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology widely inputs from developers using a Unity toolkit we created applied to different fields, such as entertainment [5, 88], that allows integrating all 14 of our low vision support tools education [41, 72], and accessibility [24, 78].