Valletta Mayor Is Presenting Groundbreaking Autism VR At Stanford University And Google X
Professor Alexiei Dingli, the current Mayor of Valletta and Senior Lecturer of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Malta, is part of a team who’ve been working on a virtual reality app.
But not just any app: this app lets people puts you in the shoes of a child with autism. Once you put in the VR lenses, you are transported to a school setting and literally see and sense the world through the eyes of a child with autism.
Now, people can live the experience that an autistic child lives through everyday.
The team behind this groundbreaking technology, which also includes Dr. Vanessa Camilleri, a lecturer at the Department of AI, as well as Mr. Fouad Haddud, a student specialising in AI, wanted to overcome a specific problem they saw in people living or working with people with autism.
“We wanted to create a VR experience that would tackle autism precisely with empathy,” explains Prof. Dingli. “My eldest son had an autistic boy in class. But no one prepared him for this, they just told him that the autistic child will probably behave differently,” he explains in reference the ineffective ways that autistic children in school are dealt with.
“The idea is to prepare teachers and children to hopefully be more understanding when an autistic child is introduced in their class,” he says. “The idea behind our approach is to create a VR experience which mimics the feelings and thoughts of an autistic child.
After months of testing their app with parents, teachers and other relevant groups, the Maltese team are today headed off to America to present this groundbreaking technology throughout the week.
Today they will be presenting their technology at the Institute for the Future, a US-based think tank that helps organisation plan for the future.
On Thursday they will be headed to Google X, the semi-secret research and development facility founded by Google.
On Friday, after meeting the Maltese community in San Francisco in his capacity as mayor, he will put his AI hat back on and spend the next two days at a technology conference at Stanford University.
Most technology companies would jump at the opportunity for even one of these meetings, let alone all of them in one week.
If things go well, a Maltese team might have just created an affordable, accessible method of empathy for a largely misunderstood section of society, people with autism.
And it doesn’t end there – if all goes well, this technology can be applied to other disorders, as well as to other misunderstood groups such as migrants.
Do you think that this technology could change the way we interact with children with Autism? Let us know in the comments below.
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