Co-Design of a Virtual Reality Multiplayer Adventure Game for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Mixed Methods Study.

Background: Virtual reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging their support for multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance, which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of VR-based game environments for social skills training is still understudied and deserves the deployment of an inclusive design approach to ensure its acceptability by target users.

Objective: We aimed to present the inclusive design process that we had followed to develop the Zentastic VR adventure game to foster social skills training in adolescents with ASD and to investigate its feasibility as a training environment for adolescents.

Working on Cognitive Functions in a Fully Digitalized Multisensory Interactive Room: A New Approach for Intervention in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

The feasibility of working on cognitive functions with children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) inside Multisensory Interactive Rooms (MIRs) has been poorly investigated, even if sensory atypicalities are common in ASD and usual intervention rooms could represent a challenging sensory setting for patients with ASD. We hypothesized that the possibility to calibrate the sensory stimulation offered by this type of environment, able to promote a positive emotional state in patients with ASD, can consequently favor the interaction with the therapist and the motivation towards activities targeting cognitive functions. High- and low-functioning children and low-functioning adolescents/adults underwent five sessions in a fully digitalized MIR, working on sustained attention, selective attention, association, single inhibition, receptive communication, verbalization, and turn.