When the World Opens Up: Journeys of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Social Virtual Reality
Alexandra Covaci, Winnie Tsang, Sophia Ppali, Paraskevi Triantafyllopoulou, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Oscar Zhou, Fotis Liarokapis, Marios Constantinides, Mohamed Khamis, Shujun Li · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)
This CHI 2026 paper challenges the dominant remedial paradigm in HCI research on virtual reality and people with intellectual disabilities (ID), which has largely framed VR as a tool for training functional life skills (cooking, shopping, transport) in scripted, controlled…
intellectual disability · virtual reality · social VR · VRChat · disability justice