Why
Children with autism spectrum disorder or ADHD benefit from regular, motivating exercises that support their motor, cognitive, sensory and emotional development. DiverSSity brings these exercises into the child's real environment rather than a separate virtual world: the headset shows the room as it is, and the activities appear inside it.
The activities
Magic Garden
A garden appears behind the room's real window. The child collects seeds, waters plants and talks with Greta, the gardener.
Magic Aquarium
A focus and exploration exercise: the child touches the bubbles rising in aquariums placed around the room.
Magic Jam
The child slices fruit launched across the room, with a score to beat.
Magic Party
The child hands out cake to party guests and recognises how each guest feels.
Snoezelen room
A calm space for sensory regulation, to come back to between activities.
How it works
The headset scans the room and places each activity on real surfaces. Every activity targets emotional, sensory, cognitive or motor goals. Greta, the gardener, listens and answers by voice, using speech recognition, a language model and speech synthesis. Each session is recorded with our version of XRXP, so a therapist can see the room, the child's movements and the scores of each activity, and follow the session live. A dashboard for therapists is being developed.
Who builds it
AppiTech develops the platform under an Innosuisse grant, in close collaboration with DiverSSity SA. The project also involves an art-direction team for the look and the gameplay, sound designers from EDHEA, and a psychologist from Clinique Dis7.
Technology
- Unity 6 on Meta Quest, with the Meta XR SDK and its room-understanding tools.
- Voice conversation through a voice server that uses Mistral's speech and language models (cloud services).
- Session recording and live view with our version of XRXP.