VR SAFE

About The Center for Advancement of Youth:

The Center for Advancement of Youth (CAY) is a part of the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) that provides coordinated care for children with behavioral and developmental needs. Founded in 2011, CAY combines clinical expertise, telehealth services, and collaboration with statewide agencies to improve access to care for children and their families. Their focus is on ensuring that families have the resources and support needed to navigate developmental and behavioral health challenges, with the goal of improving access to appropriate care regardless of their circumstances.

About the project:

The Virtual Reality Space Allowing Friendly Engagements (VR SAFE) is a proof-of-concept system developed for the University of Mississippi Medical Center's Center for the Advancement of Youth. The application was designed to support clinical research into Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by exploring whether measurable behavioral data collected in controlled virtual environments could help inform diagnostic understanding and severity assessment.

Current research into objective metrics for ASD diagnosis is still developing. VR SAFE was created as an exploratory platform to evaluate whether structured social interaction scenarios, combined with high-fidelity behavioral tracking, could produce meaningful signals relevant to clinical assessment.

The system was built using the Unity game engine and delivers immersive, scenario-based environments that simulate real-world social interactions. These scenarios were configured to elicit repeatable behavioral responses under controlled conditions defined by the research team.

To support analysis, the platform integrates HTC Vive Pro Eye hardware with Tobii eye tracking technology to capture gaze direction, eye movement, and positional data at high frequency. This data is recorded continuously, structured, and stored locally in JSON format for downstream research analysis and metric development.

VR SAFE provides a controlled experimental environment for studying behavioral responses in children with ASD while enabling researchers to evaluate whether eye tracking and movement data can be used to derive quantifiable metrics that may support future diagnostic and severity assessment approaches.