XR-Aphantasia

Exploring Extended Reality for Aphantasics

Most people can easily form visual images in their minds, allowing them to recollect and reimagine familiar environments, pasts, and futures; to engage in meditation or relaxation; and to lose themselves in worlds created in response to music, literature, art, and film. Almost 4% of people lack this visual mental imagery (a condition called aphantasia), requiring them to adopt alternative cognitive strategies to accomplish these tasks.

This project examines how immersive extended reality (XR) technologies (i.e., augmented and virtual reality) can be used to understand and enhance aphantasics’ cognitive strategies on different tasks, supporting them to create vivid visual representations. Exploratory work will be used to develop a portfolio of research directions for larger grant applications around cognitive augmentation and inclusive design for aphantasia. Human participants’ empirical work with immersion and visual imagery ability as independent variables will be used as proof-of-concept, producing a publishable paper and dataset.

[WIP] System description

Features

• See the familiar/unfamiliar objects in front of the user.
• About 1m in front of the user, so that they can look at them on demand and draw on paper heads-down.

Watch the demo video or try the live version.

Link: https://extralitylab.dsv.su.se/

Development and Installation

• Unity 6.3.9f1
• Target: Meta Quest
• Interaction Toolkit: XRIT

Usage

To use XR-Aphantasia and interact with its features, follow the guidelines below:

• RightJoystick: Turns the object around Y-Z axes.
• A/B button go to next object.
• UI Menu:
  • Choose between Familiar/Unfamiliar.
  • Control counterbalance.

References

• TBD

Contributors

Luis Quintero https://luisqtr.com