# ID Tech: A Virtual Reality Simulator Training for Teenagers with Intellectual Disabilities
## 2 State of the Art  
For several years, research has been conducted on the use of VR for the rehabilitation of people with ID. In 2005, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [10] presented a review of the literature highlighting how VR can be used as an intervention and/or assessment tool. They indicate three areas of application: promoting skills for independent living, improving cognitive performance, and improving social skills. The authors state that, apart from studies with people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these early experiments showed the possibility of transferring learning from virtual to real.  
[PERSON] et al. studied learning in virtual environments of navigation tasks (learning new routes, shortcuts, etc.) for people with Down syndrome or Williams syndrome [11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. In their work, VR was used as a learning assessment tool without studying the transfer of this learning into reality. Most of their work has shown that individuals with ID are able to learn to orient themselves in VR. The authors argue that VR could be used to identify and educate those individuals most at risk of being involved in dangerous situations.  
Another work investigated the crosswalk scenario with six children with ASD [16]. Using an immersive CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), results showed that four out of six children were able to achieve the desired learning goal. These results were verified at the end of the 4-day period by having the children. The authors note that these results are encouraging for the children themselves, as they felt a sense of accomplishment, and for their parents, as they felt proud of their children's performance, whereas they were initially skeptical.  
Another study conducted with seven adults with ASD showed rather different results [17]. Their treatment protocol included 10 45-minute sessions in a non-immersive virtual environment (participants had a large 2 m \(\times\) 2 m screen in front of them). The six subjects who completed the protocol easily learned the body gestures needed to interact with the virtual environment. However, even if during the sessions the participants significantly improved their navigation performance, they did not significantly reduce the errors made when crossing the crosswalk.  
In 2021, [PERSON] et al. conducted a study seeking to establish the acceptability of VR for adolescents with intellectual disabilities [18]. They concluded that adolescents with ID had a good level of acceptance of VR and that they were able to interact in a virtual world.  
[PERSON] et al. [19] conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of explanatory factors for discomfort potentially related to the use of VR headsets. These factors are related to visual stimuli, motion, exposure time, and user age. Younger users would present more disorders than older ones. An exposure time of more than 10 min significantly increases the risk of experiencing discomfort. For people with ID, barriers to the use of VR can be related to personal factors (motor skills and attention deficits, sensitivity to moving pictures, and excitability) [20; 21]. However, lack of access to digital technologies for people with ID is also related to environmental factors, such as low funding and high costs of material, lack of knowledge on VR by teachers, and inadequate assessment of learning [22].  
To summarize, the existing studies that concern the use of VR for learning new skills show encouraging findings despite some disadvantages. However, most of these studies focus on a very specific group of participants and the limited number of participants in the studies and sometimes contradictory results indicate the need for further research. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet investigated the acceptability, feasibility, and specific benefits of immersive headset-based VR for young adults with ID (12-20 years old).