Dr Lisa Bowers

This project will explore the potential of a user-led multi-modal virtual studio environment that will facilitate touch and audio access for students with sight impaired acuities. The proposed sensory-based system will solve issues related to the sight impaired community of practitioners and students across a broad range of educational needs including, but not limited to, creative arts, engineering, and science. The sight impaired community who often feel alienated by the viso-centric nature of current computer-aided design (CAD) systems crucially need new tools to facilitate online access to CAD processes and workflows.

For distance learning students often it is difficult to facilitate creative studio-based activities in the same format as conventional universities. This can result in a short fall of distance learning students ‘maker-process’ skills and practice. The benefits of haptic technology for applied online education, such as e-crafts and e-design practice, is that it enables and enriches the student’s hands-on approach. Currently haptic technology is able to aid students’ interactions to 3D virtual environments. However, haptics that could afford greater sensory engagements with the maker-process with a fidelity akin to real-world is still to be developed. This project aims to embed haptics within a variety of ‘hands-on’ methods, designed by Open University (Engineering and Innovation school) academics. This will enable the development of a working haptic prototype which will focus on haptics and the ‘maker-process’ aiming to add value to core learning technology resources for undergraduate and post graduate programmes. In line with the OU’s ‘access to learning policies’ there is a greater onus placed onto inclusive learning, and the provision of accessible learning technology to include a variety of learners with a range of needs e.g. sensory impairment, motor skills etc… By increasing access to virtual immersive technologies a wider student body could be given access to engage with their own version of the maker-process using multimodal interactions.