EduColorVR: A Virtual Reality Serious Game for Enhancing Color Vision Deficiency Awareness in Educational Settings

EduColorVR is a virtual reality serious game designed to raise awareness of color vision deficiency (CVD) among students and educators. Built in Unity and rendered for PC-based VR, the prototype uses the physiologically grounded Brettel-Viénot-Mollon model, implemented through a dual-matrix shader, to simulate protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia. Its motivation rests on a preliminary interview study with four Swiss primary and secondary teachers, which found that CVD is rarely documented or discussed in schools and that accommodations are ad hoc because institutional guidelines are absent.

The game's mechanics include an Ishihara demonstration, color-based memory and sorting tasks, and a color-coded maze, through which educators experience how color-dependent materials appear to affected learners. The work is framed as a design-and-development study: it presents the prototype's architecture and mechanics, but no empirical validation has yet been conducted. The simulation models only full dichromacy and does not yet represent anomalous trichromacy, a limitation the authors acknowledge.

The scope is thus a Swiss educational context at primary and secondary levels, with the intended audience spanning teachers and students. The stated next steps are classroom piloting with student cohorts and middle-school experimental and control testing, aimed at measuring effects on peer empathy and on teaching practice. The supporting literature addresses CVD prevalence among secondary school students, accessibility barriers in gaming and education, and VR-based simulation as a route to empathy, providing the evidentiary foundation for the tool's design rationale.