WalkAbout - social interaction in 3D

The goal of the WalkAbout project is to investigate opportunities to help children in vulnerable groups communicate more easily and better via computer game-like environments in 3D.

The WalkAbout project is a collaboration between the departments KKL (HLT from 2021) and SRT and the work is led by Professor Peter Parnes, Pervasive and Mobile Computing together with senior lecturers Ylva Backman and Viktor Gardelli, Education.

The goal of the project is to help children in vulnerable situations to communicate in 3D environments developed with the help of computer game technology. Within the project, an application WalkAbout is developed for both computers and tablets where participants can choose avatars, walk around the environment, interact with other participants with the help of chat and animations and more.

WalkAbout is a further development of Dialogica which is an application to help people with aphasia to communicate more easily. Unlike Dialogica, WalkAbout is a more open environment where users themselves decide content and how the application should be used.

Examples of applications include:

• Help children with neuropsychiatric disabilities, NPF to communicate.
• Help people with language challenges to communicate via real-time translation between different languages in text and speech via speech synthesis.
• Conduct teaching and lectures in 3D.
• With more...

The first part of the project will run during the autumn of 2020 in the form of a collaborative project within Social Innovation with funding from Vinnova til November 2020. However, the development will continue in other related projects.