The Aim of the Study

A user experience (UX) designer and researcher McKay (2017) mentions the difficulties that autistic people have in one of her articles: “As an autistic person, I experience the world at a heightened level of intensity. I’m hypersensitive to everything in my world: light, sound, colour, textures, shapes, movement, my emotions and the emotions of those around me. Everything hits me in one go like a blastwave and it can take a moment to process and adjust. When I get overwhelmed and the world just gets too much, I experience something called sensory overload. Then I either spin out of control and experience a meltdown or I shut down and completely withdraw”. She also complains the lack of assistive technologies to support the sensory differences or to reduce the sensory overload. Thus, in this thesis, we attempt to develop a toolkit to be used in the applications for autistic people with sensory difficulties.

This study implies a spatial interface as an open-source toolkit to be implemented in MR applications for autistic people with sensory processing disorder. In that way, autism application developers from all over the world can have access to a base design template and get easily started developing for people with ASD using MR technologies. This toolkit also aims to encourage other developers to get involved in building solutions for autistic people.