The Methodology of the Study

In this study, the action research model is adapted as the methodology of the research. The action research method includes identifying the problem about the assisting technologies for autistic people and taking action to improve the life of people with ASD. The goal of this method is to share the knowledge on recent technologies that can be a benefit for autistic people and related societies.

During the study, the different practices and applications for autistic people are examined. As a result of those explorations, it is found out that there is an intervention method called “Home Base” which can be a foundation of the intended interface design (Myles, 2004; Coffin & Bassity, 2007; Hovorka, 2015; Griswold, 2017). The home base method supports autistic people to function better within their environment wherever they are (Myles, 2005). The contribution of this paper lies on the attempt to develop a MR home base space for people with SPD, that has not been studied earlier. To create a home base, an area within each of the daily used places of autistic people is chosen, and they are equipped with personal objects of autistic people, so they can relax, and keep working on their task in the home base without any distraction. In the first part of this research, the essential information on autism spectrum disorder are provided with the background study on app interfaces of existing autism applications. Moreover, the related studies on mixed reality and spatial interfaces are explained.

In the second part, the design and development phases of the intended interface are described in detail along with the prototyping process. Throughout the design, the principles for graphical user interfaces (Marcus, 1995; Martin, 1995), the interface recommendations for people with ASD (Pavlov, 2014; Hussain, Abdullah, et.al., 2016; Jordan, Farr, Fager, & Male, 2016), and the guideline of Microsoft for HoloLens (URL-1) are applied to the proposed interface. And it is developed in Unity Game Engine and tested on the HoloLens device.

The proposed interface is evaluated with cognitive walkthrough (Dix, Finlay, Abowd, & Beale, 2003; Galitz, 2002; Polson, Lewis, Rieman, and Wharton, 1992), heuristic evaluation (Shneiderman, 1997; Nielsen, 1993; Pavlov, 2014), and usability testing on HoloLens.

In the end, the results and the future of the study are discussed further.