Virtual Reality is an emerging area and its core technologies advance rapidly. It is used mostly for training tools in many domains such as medicine, military, space, education and entertainment. The current paper is a state-of-the-art paper with the main goal of bringing people that are not visually impaired closer, from a social point of view, to the visually impaired community. The virtual environments are to be used as a point of interaction between these two categories of people. The strategy consists of developing highly interactive and immersive virtual environments, where multiple users need to work together in order to achieve that goal. The virtual environments are based on gamification principles and, in order to be consumer ready, the project needs to use consumer ready electronics and technology that is already used in the gaming industry or cost effective solutions. Virtual Reality is an emerging area and its core technologies advance rapidly. It is used mostly for training tools in many domains such as medicine, military, space, education and entertainment. The current paper is a state-of-the-art paper with the main goal of bringing people that are not visually impaired closer, from a social point of view, to the visually impaired community. The virtual environments are to be used as a point of interaction between these two categories of people. The strategy consists of developing highly interactive and immersive virtual environments, where multiple users need to work together in order to achieve that goal. The virtual environments are based on gamification principles and, in order to be consumer ready, the project needs to use consumer ready electronics and technology that is already used in the gaming industry or cost effective solutions.

Virtual training environemnt; visually impaired; virtual reality; serious games; social interaction.