Capítulo 17. Just a Virtual Touch

Capítulo 17. Just a Virtual Touch

*Raquel Espinosa Castañeda

Hugo I. Medellín Castillo

Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí

Can you imagine how to teach architecture or sculpture to blind people? The concept of “inclusive education” goes beyond considering the needs of people with disabilities; it refers to the process of recognizing the students’ learning needs and to act according to such needs. People with visual limitations do not necessarily require more attention and dedication than other people; they only need to be guided from the beginning and to have accessible information. Thus, one of the main challenges of the universal education is to generate inclusive and assistive educational technologies, which can be used for the teaching and learning of people with disabilities. In this chapter is presented and discussed the development and assessment of haptic-enabled virtual reality learning systems for the education of non-sighted people.

Since many years ago, several studies have shown that the human sense of touch is a psychological source of knowledge. Recently, the progress in computer technologies have led to the development of virtual reality and haptic systems, which are able to provide virtual touch and information about size, shape and physical properties of virtual objects. Moreover, computer haptic systems can also be used to generate mental representations of virtual objects. However, although virtual reality and haptic systems have been widely used in science and engineering, there is little research work about the design and application of such systems in education, particularly in the teaching and learning process of visually impaired individuals. Now with the help of technology, education is just a virtual touch away.

Inclusive Communication and Education

West and Turner (2004) define the communication process as the social process in which individuals use symbols to establish and interpret the meaning of their environment. The four key terms of this conceptual perspective are: communication as a social process, as a symbol, as meaning and as an environment. Furthermore, education is also a social process that involves the interaction between two or more people, the teacher and the student(s). Thus, the terms communication and education can be compared as shown in Figure 16.1.

The interaction among the teacher and the apprentices is part of the educational process, which is a dynamic, complex and continuously changing process. In both education and communication there is interaction between symbols, which are an arbitrary label or a representation of the phenomena where the message is extracted from manufactured or constructed meanings. Words are symbols that represent notions of concepts and things; for example, the word chair represents the object in which one can sit on (West & Turner, 2004). The student, as a message receiver, will extract the meaning from the message. If different persons do not share the same meanings, they will have difficulties to speak and interpret the same fact (West & Turner, 2004). In such situations, the teacher must be able to explain, repeat and clarify the concepts.

The environment is also important in the educational process since it refers to the situation or context in which the communication takes place. The environment in the communication process can also be mediated and established with technical. These mediated environments necessarily influence the communication between two persons (West & Turner, 2004).

User Centered-Design (UCD) as a Support
for Inclusive Education

Inclusive education is part of the dominant discourse around the world, but the terminology used in every country is different; for example, England uses the term “special educational needs and disabilities” (sen) and Scotland uses the term “additional support needs” (asn) (Riddell et al., 2019a). Moreover, the analysis of administrative data suggests that there are important differences between England and Scotland regarding to the identification of children with sen and asn, and the provision of statutory support plans (Riddell et al., 2019b). There also seems to be large differences in technology. Therefore, actual assistive educational technology centered-design for the blind user is often missing. “In 1994, at the World Conference of Salamanca, for the first time, the problem of inclusion and special educational needs were addressed; thereafter, these subjects became two of the most important principles regarding educational policies” (Palmeros-Ávila et al., 2017, p. 161). Since then, discourse and jurisdiction have been part of a distinct narrative. At the beginning doctors used to be very involved in the education process, but now the roll has been given to teachers, and the focus has not to do with incapacity, but what is contending under the big umbrella of asn (Riddell et al., 2019a).

The attention of the students with sen in Mexico meets what the National Education Program 2001-2006 points out according to the need of establishing a regulatory framework, as well as monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that will regulate the educational integration processes in all basic education schools in the country, in the area of equity, relevance and quality (Secretaría de Educación Pública [sep], 2006).

Cinematography System

In order to promote the development of assistive technologies for the inclusive education of blind people, in this section is described the cinematography reality system with haptic habilitation.

Sight loss affects more than one million people in Mexico, a number that represents the 11.5 of the total population (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía [inegi], 2010). Losing sight can change many areas of a person’s life, even apparently trivial things like being able to watch cinema. Having access to movies is part of the cultural conversation. Movies are made for everybody, just because somebody can’t see, doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy a film (Ford & Spielberg, 2014). Science fiction cinema can become an excellent bearer for reflection and social dissemination of scientific technological advances (Marín-Ramos, 2018). In the area of arts, particularly in film, a novel interactive cinematography system for blind people has been proposed and developed (Espinosa-Castañeda & Medellín-Castillo, 2020). The system, named as cigi®, is a novel interactive cinematography system that incorporates the sense of touch to the movies by using virtual reality and haptic technologies. The cigi system creates a virtual world for the blind user to explore, feel, and touch the scenarios by means of the haptic device. As the user explores the virtual world, the corresponding audio to the film story is played.

The main features of the cigi system are:

• Virtual 3D objects can be freely explored by the user using the haptic device.

• Virtual scenes and audio stories can be forwarded or rewind according to the user’s desire.

• The exploring time of virtual scenes and objects is not limited.

It is possible to reproduce different movies, however the 3D modeling of the virtual scenes, objects, textures and audios is required, i.e. a 3D virtual-haptic movie must be created.

The cigi system and the interactive-tactile 3D movie is shown in Figure 17.2. The haptic cursor is shown in figure 2b as a blue sphere, which corresponds to the user position in the virtual environment.

Recommendations

The integration of virtual reality and haptic technologies by gathering input and feedback from target users represent a potential educational tool for visual impaired people. The results of this research centered the needs of blind students when conceptualizing knowledge, and has demonstrated that blind people can learn and improve their skills by means of the virtual touch provided by haptic devices. Moreover, tactile mental images can be induced into blind people so they can recognize objects as in real life. The results demonstrated that this system can be used as assistive educational technology for the inclusive education of blind people.

Authors acknowledge the support from Conacyt (Project #283503, Agreement C-252/2017), Conaculta, and Promep from sep.

References

Espinosa-Castañeda, R. y Medellín-Castillo, H. I. (2021). Virtual Haptic Perception as an Educational Assistive Technology: A Case Study in Inclusive Education. IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 14(1), pp. 152-160. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9115280

Ford, H. y Spielberg, S. (19 de mayo de 2014). “Not Much to See”: How the Blind Enjoy Movies [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/QJguIANUEX8

Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (inegi) (2013). Las personas con discapacidad en México: una visión al 2010. inegi. http://internet.contenidos.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/Productos/prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/censos/poblacion/2010/discapacidad/702825051785.pdf

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Riddell, S., Gillooly, A., Harris, N., & Davidge, G. (2019a). Autonomy, Rights and Children with Special Needs: A New Paradigm? Findings from an ESRC Funded Study [Online Report]. Economic & Social Research Council. http://www.docs.hss.ed.ac.uk/education/creid/Projects/39_vi_ESRC_SENChildren_FinalRpt.pdf

Riddell, S., Gillooly, A., Harris, N., & Davidge, G. (2019b). Autonomy, Rights and Children with Special Needs: A New Paradigm? The Rights of Children with Special and Additional Support Needs in England and Scotland. Economic & Social Research Council. CREID Briefing, 45.

Castellano Pérez, E. y Escandón Minutti, M. C. (Coord.) (2006). Orientaciones generales para el funcionamiento de los servicios de educación especial. sep.

West, R., & Turner, L. H. (2004). Teoría de la comunicación: Análisis y aplicación. McGraw Hill.