Virtual reality in autism: state of the art.

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by core deficits with regard to three domains, i.e. social interaction, communication and repetitive or stereotypic behaviour. It is crucial to develop intervention strategies helping individuals with autism, their caregivers and educators in daily life. For this purpose, virtual reality (VR), i.e. a simulation of the real world based on computer graphics, can be useful as it allows instructors and therapists to offer a safe, repeatable and diversifiable environment during learning. This mini review examines studies that have investigated the use of VR in autism.

Field-induced clearing in sphere-sphere and rod-sphere binary mixtures of charged colloidal particles.

Binary mixtures of larger and smaller colloids having charges of equal sign display unusual response to low-frequency electric fields. We show here that the previously reported negative torque acting on rodlike particles when in presence of a sea of smaller particles is accompanied by a field-induced clearing of the suspension. Measurements of transmitted intensity performed on mixtures of large (dilute) and small (semidilute) spherical particles indicate that such a clearing effect is universal and due to an anisotropic E2 -dependent redistribution of the small spheres around the large ones. We interpret this behavior as resulting from O(E2) electro-osmotic flows whose magnitude is greatly enhanced by the presence of the small particles.