After looking at adaptive VR systems and the use of immersive technology within air travel, I wanted to understand more specifically how VR is being used to support sensory and emotional regulation in autistic people. I found a systematic review that brought together 13 studies published between 2018 and 2025. The paper was particularly useful because, unlike much of the existing VR and autism research which focuses on social skills or emotion recognition, this review specifically examined emotion regulation and sensory regulation.
The review identified short-term benefits across a range of interventions, particularly reductions in anxiety, emotional lability and sensory hypersensitivity. The authors found that the most promising interventions tended to include personalisation, structured repetition, realistic environments, immersive exposure and physiological biofeedback. This is particularly relevant to my project because many of these qualities connect directly with issues already emerging from my research into autistic air travel: unpredictability, sensory overload, differing support needs and the importance of control.
One of the strongest arguments within the paper is that VR can create an environment that feels realistic while still allowing much greater control over what the user experiences. Visual complexity, sound, social demand and the intensity of different stimuli can all potentially be changed in ways that would be difficult or impossible within a real public environment. The review describes this as a useful middle ground between completely artificial exercises and real-world exposure, where unpredictability itself may cause anxiety or shutdown.
The paper also highlights that VR provides a sense of safety, privacy, comfort, control and customisability. For me, control is particularly important because it has repeatedly appeared throughout my primary and secondary research. Instead of asking an autistic traveller to simply tolerate an environment, VR potentially gives them more influence over how and when they experience difficult sensory information.
One of the most interesting findings was that there appear to be two quite different approaches to regulation through VR.
The first is controlled or graded exposure. Several studies repeatedly introduced participants to sounds they found difficult within immersive environments, while still allowing them to disengage. Across these studies, participants generally reported reductions in distress and increased tolerance of the sounds over repeated sessions. Some studies also reported transfer into real-world situations.
This made me think again about sensory familiarisation before flying. Instead of only teaching somebody the steps of going through an airport, VR could potentially introduce the sensory experience of those stages as well. This might include security scanner beeps, airport announcements, trays hitting surfaces, boarding noises, aircraft engines or cabin sounds. The important difference would be that these could be experienced in a controlled setting where the traveller determines the pace, repetition and intensity.
The second approach is almost the opposite: self-led calming and regulation. Rather than deliberately presenting something difficult, the VR environment becomes somewhere the person can withdraw into and regulate themselves.
For my project, I think this second direction may eventually be even more important.
One study within the review particularly stood out to me. Mills et al. (2023) developed Evenness, a virtual version of a sensory room. Rather than following a structured exposure programme, users were able to interact freely with familiar sensory stimuli and use the environment according to their own needs.
The study involved 31 adults, including 12 autistic adults, who used the platform an average of six times over five months. Reduced anxiety was the most commonly reported benefit, alongside reductions in depression and improvements in sensory profile scores. The study is small and cannot prove that a virtual sensory room will work for every autistic person, but the concept is extremely relevant to my own thinking.
Earlier in my airport research, I questioned whether shared sensory rooms actually provide enough personal control. One participant in my primary research described Sunflower lounges as often being open, loud and not sufficiently tailored to autistic sensory needs. A virtual sensory environment potentially approaches this problem differently. Instead of expecting everybody within a shared room to find the same physical environment calming, each person could potentially access their own sensory environment.
This does not mean that I have decided to create a virtual sensory room. However, it provides an important precedent showing that the idea of translating a physical sensory room into an individually experienced VR environment has already been explored with autistic adults.
The research around auditory hypersensitivity was also particularly interesting. Four of the sensory-regulation studies focused on difficult sounds, using head-mounted VR systems to provide controlled exposure.
The SoundFields project used 360-degree binaural spatial audio to recreate problematic sounds within an immersive environment. Sounds included alarms, fireworks, crying babies and household equipment. Participants could repeatedly encounter these sounds within the controlled VR experience. A later study found that reductions in anxiety were maintained four weeks afterwards and that the effects were stronger with immersive spatial audio than with ordinary stereo sound.