- My name is John Paul Hansen,
I'm a professor at the Technical University of Denmark,
and I'll be presenting a video, not a slideshow,
on a project that we've been working on
for a couple of years.
And it's all about giving access to virtual reality
from a wheelchair.
Now you may know that virtual reality
is an interesting new media that allows people
to play games, take training courses,
and in the not so far future,
also to participate in social event.
You have things like Facebook spaces and so on.
That would be a tremendous offer
to people who have mobility problems,
that they can go and partake
in a meeting or social gathering
with people on a virtual reality kind of setting.
Also, you have seen virtual reality been used
for evaluating new designs of wheelchairs
and for teaching wheelchair users
how to use a new model of a wheelchair.
Finally, we found that using virtual reality
to teach designers and architects
about the accessibility of their constructions,
their designs,
is really a helpful way,
it makes them feel more impatic
to how it is to be driving around,
for instance, in a wheelchair
in a building construction like this one
trying to find the escalator.
My current project is all about providing people
in wheelchairs an access to the workforce.
And this is the whole idea of the project that we're doing
that by being able to control a robot remotely
from your wheelchair,
you could actually become a person
that assists in facility management.
We have a collaboration
with one of the biggest world leading
facility management companies, ISS,
and they have the problem that their floor washing robots
often gets stuck in a corner,
they can't move on because of some unforeseen conditions.
Or because people are actually bullying these robots.
So what if you could have a person in a wheelchair
to be a Uber driver of robots?
That he could take over, and help this washing robot
out of it's current locked up condition.
This is the idea that we would like to make possible
by having this platform by which you can use your wheelchair
to drive around remotely.
The reason why we would not just plug into the joystick
of the wheelchair, and then use that to drive the robot,
or drive you in a virtual reality game,
is that there are so many different models of wheelchairs
out there that for you to find the general access or an API
to the wheelchairs as a developer,
would be really, really difficult.
So, we need a platform that simple, low cost,
that can be transported, moved around,
that would allow all kinds of wheelchairs,
front wheel, mid wheel, back wheel, driven, electrical,
manual wheelchairs, to get this access to virtual reality
of robots.
I see a sticker up now, I only have like three minutes back,
and that's exactly the time it will take for me
to show you the video.
I hope this works, okay.
Right.
Play full screen.
Excuse me.
I'll just start here, no problem.
So, this is a Unity game, we are pushing blocks around
with this wheelchair.
Me sitting there.
This is our very first prototype.
And we simply build it out of things we could find
in a supermarket or a do it yourself store.
We had a model from Lego
that people would see in their glasses.
And, for instance, the curb here was very difficult to pass,
you couldn't drive over it,
and when people got stuck on that,
they really had this feeling
of what it would be like to be in a wheelchair
and not being able to go to the sideways.
We tested it with 26 users.
And seven of them got cybersick.
For that reason, we redesigned the whole setup.
We used an electrical wheelchair
and we optimized on the controls of the encoder,
how that transfer into virtual reality.
We build various kinds of games that people could try out.
And we tested the very kinds of interaction principles,
so in this case we used gaze interaction and head nodding
to remove the bikes.
The reason why we put bikes up as obstacles
was that many people
in wheelchairs really don't like bikes
being parked all around,
so we showed how this would look in reality,
we worked on the idea how would you like
to have additional augmented reality interfaces
that you could control.
For instance, with eye or head movements.
In another paper we compared this
to how you would interact with a bike,
and it actually turned out that people were better
in a wheelchair than a bike.
We've used it for testing gaze interaction for wheelchairs,
which is a quite interesting idea
that even if you don't have a joystick control,
you could roll your wheelchair
by just gazing where you wanted to go.
Now this is the platform we built,
and in the paper there's links to how we build it,
the components,
and also a version of the software we are using
for the encoders.
And we went out testing it in a care home
with users who have never ever tried
to play a computer game before.
So they were really, really excited about this
and being able to, in virtual reality, have a success
of going through that bike maze.
We could use it with different models of wheelchairs
and we had such an encouraging feedback from the users
that this really convinced us that next step should be
to explore how you can remotely control robots,
in this case, it's a tailored robot we build ourself.
This is the very first time he's trying this
and since he's a wheelchair user by himself
he kind of is an expert
on how to drive a vehicle around in this building.
That's the video, that's what worked today,
I'm so sorry for this, and I hope you read the paper
and if you go to the website, you'll also find a video
with audio on that you could watch.
(applause)
- [Woman] Thank you.
And thank you to all our presenters and all in the room.