**5.1 AR technology can be used to guide social visual cues and provide additional extended information**

Whether in non-verbal social communication or in different visual image information, AR technology is considered to be a scanner. Through a hand-held tablet, PC or other imaging devices, any image information can be converted into a scanning icon that is suitable for AR application (**Figure 7**). Moreover, through lens sensing in front of a hand-held tablet or PC, the AR app can overlay dynamic information images (such as 3D animations, additional visual information assistance, videos and audio media, etc.) behind the static images. Researchers call this a framework approach for visual cue guidance, which means that it constructs an autistic child's sensory cognition of the visual guidance through a fixed visual framework (they are usually static images, such as social storybooks, which are commonly used in autism training). With a fixed visual cue framework and sequential story guiding the content, children with autism can quickly grasp the main structure of social stories through visual images and they can then extend to more complex and diverse social content, or context, details. This division of labor can greatly reduce the cognitive load of autistic children in their understanding of information, through the hierarchical information of AR technology, and it can also

#### **Figure 7.**

*AR realizes hierarchical visual indexing. Firstly, the fixed visual structure is used to help autistic children master the social context framework. Secondly, AR technology is used to link further videos and audio information [21].*

attract the attention of autistic children with the help of the audio-visual effects of AR technology (**Figure 7**). The information provided by AR includes different layers of visual information, and complex social information is deconstructed by using a visual architecture. Moreover, with the support of AR technology and visual cues, the extended social information content is supported and improved [21, 28].

grasp complex social content and sensory information, so that they could learn to

*How to Use the Advantages of AR and VR Technique to Integrate Special Visual Training…*

Through the interaction strategy of a structured visual concept and entity, a visual framework, or visual primer, can be established to help autistic children understand and deal with abstract social relations, such as the distance between relatives in social relations, the social connection between different roles, or role playing and the speculation of transpositional thinking (**Figure 8**) [49]. In addition, the 3D character animations provided by AR also have the advantage of multiple viewing angles. Autistic children can watch the social relations of different character objects by different role identities and then speculate on the game. At the same time, through the game's dolls in the board games, such a learning framework can become a key training strategy for understanding social games, or disguising games, with the aid of the concept mapping and visual content that is superimposed by AR technology [50]. By combining the game operating mechanism with the board game concept, players can easily pretend to take on the role of God (or the third-person perspective). In this way, we can at the same time solve the problem of the weak imagination of autistic children. As AR animation directly makes up for the visual sensory information, which is difficult to show in the operation content, it provides effective social animation content to help autistic children understand the social status among different roles (such as hugging family, waving at friends, schoolmates clapping encouragement), supplemented by fixed visual guidance, which

deconstruct continuous social actions and interaction concepts.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94587*

constitutes a more stable and dynamic social interaction structure [17].

**game environment**

**51**

**5.3 VR technology can provide an alternative mechanism of different multiple viewpoints, an immersive virtual environment, and an immersive theater**

VR technology is a great breakthrough in the field of autism social training. It can change the visual training strategy under different sensory conditions and through multiple viewpoints ('multiple viewpoints' means that there is a perspective shift of being able to look at something through another person's eyes. One of the biggest influences that multiple viewpoints have is that they enable us to see how others view the world, which enables one to experience another person's sense of sight face-to-face; of course, we just let the autistic person wear the head mount display, in order to display the other person's viewpoint via a camera), and an immersive theater game environment. Moreover, it contributes to the scale, from being a table game size to a sensory experience with the whole immersion environment, and even to the development of a semi-immersive Mixed Reality (MR) training mechanism. Such content has a different training purpose and different game strategies on the basis of training. Through visual experience and fixed visual guidance, researchers can enlarge the scale of board games to the framework of immersive theater games. Using the same visual concept strategy, we can develop a social interaction mode, with the first-person perspective and God's third-person perspective, and then, through to the immersive and semi-immersive interaction experience, we can construct the participants' on-the-spot sensory experience of the social interaction objects. These visual senses can be used to guide and induce empathy through the visual sensory mechanism provided by VR technology, and they are applied in the following situations, as described previously: (1) first-person and third-person role perspective exchange (empathy and empathy construction), and (2) social situation simulation. The operation of this mechanism requires more situational guidance and sensory conditions, combined with different game and entity interaction strategies, to achieve the training effect, and such a training form needs to be designed and interpreted through a situational script. Through such a
