Abstract:

Nowadays, we are adopting technologies and services with the aim of building smart living places in the context of the so called smart cities paradigm. Information society moves toward interaction society and novel approaches based on mixd reality (3D immersive world and augmented reality) becomes popular and most demanded. Smart Cities is an strategic topic in the h2020 european agenda. in this context, the creation of content layer for immersive neither augmented 3d interactive world will be a important activity for artist and designers.

This paper focuses on and specific target group (user with cognitives disabilities) and how this new technologies may be potentially suitable to help them for a social and labour integration. This paper show the experience of building a transmedia experience of a virtual immersive museum in a school of special education. The aim is to develop a collaborative and immersive museum using virtual reality environment (Open Simulator). The users can build their rooms for exhibit their art crafts, put their content and include comments and personal comments. Further goals are to promote collaborative activities (guided tours) and exporting to other media (cardboard, and mobile devices using alternative technologies).

Our focus group are composed of 6 children with different ages ranging form 8 to 20 year old with different levels of cognitive disabilities, including autism disorders. The project has different objectives and levels of difficulty:
- Walk through and discover the 3D immersive world, acquiring skills for 3D movement, orientation and object localization.
- Character building. Identify their avatar, and personalize according to their preferences,
- Building activities: create walls, upload media content and putting on the 3D environment.
- Communication activities. Manipulating chat and other interactive elements where they can interact with the 3D world.
- Collaborative activities, such as follow a group, meet someone, etc.

Once we have achieved the attention on this 3D world, the next step is to promote creativity on this scenario, and therefore the opportunity to create contents and stories to discover in these world. Storytelling is a good technique to promote their abilities, as a therapeutic activity as well as a opportunity for creating contents (interactive 3D world, objects, etc) that may be collected and viewed by society as a public or private spaces, it may be a potential use for a collaborative activity to create contents and incomes (using virtual stores, ticket visit or any other kind of business models). This paper shows the advances and outcomes of this activity, part of a more general project: the e-Integra project in the context of Information Society, particularly in the area of attention to diversity, and focusing on the development of technology to provide comprehensive training to people with special needs.

This work was partially funded by the Spanish National Plan of I+D+i (TIN2013-44586-R) Project: e-Training and e-Coaching for the social and laboral integration.

Keywords:

Transmedia storytelling, mixed reality, inclusive design, smart city, autism, cognitive disabilities, content creation.