Enabling people with motor impairments to get around in 360° video experiences: Concept and prototype of an adaptable control systemEnabling people with motor impairments to get around in 360° video experiences: Concept and prototype of an adaptable contr

Sammanfattning: This thesis is about an alternative control system for interacting with 360° videos and focuses on people with physical impairments (PI). People with PI face restrictions that keep them from exploring the world like able-bodied people. For example, a walk in the forest can be impossible because of lacking accessibility or harmful weather conditions. My contribution is located in a bigger project, the Experience Library 360°, that aims to provide virtual, interactive and immersive experiences of real-world locations. As VR applications are often controlled by head movements or mouse clicks, people with certain PI are excluded. My goal was to find alternative control units to make the experience accessible, and to validate the idea in practice. 360° video technology is still young and there has been no previous research in the context of assistive technologies. I used a literature study to gain understanding of the field and to generate conceptual ideas, a target user interview to evaluate those ideas, and a prototyping phase to build a proof-of-concept. The result is an operable prototype that features an intermediate box to which a control unit can be connected via USB. It includes an API that re-maps controller input to video commands. The proof-of-concept validates a part of the system, but has not been user tested. My research shows that it is possible to use alternative control units to exclude potentially less people from use. Those ideas can be applied in other human-computer interaction contexts relevant to people with and without physical impairments.