Play Beyond Vision: Children’s Embodied Strategies in Non-Visual Extended Reality

Extended Reality (XR) enables play, learning, and social experiences, yet, the field remains dominated by an understanding of XR as a primarily vision-based technology. For children, this visual focus may introduce challenges such as uncomfortable headsets, excessive immersion, social withdrawal, and reduced shared play. We propose non-visual XR as a new design space for immersive experiences without visual augmentation, where virtual elements are conveyed through spatial audio, haptics, and embodied orientation. We investigate how children experience a sense of “being there” without relying on sight, and how they imagine interacting with invisible virtual elements. We conducted an exploratory study with 38 children consisting of two activities: a playful non-visual XR probe in which children located and chased an invisible ghost using custom-made wearables, and an elicitation activity in which children imagined interaction concepts within a Wizard-of-Oz setup. Our analysis shows how children interacted and envisioned non‑visual interactions using movement to sense and interpret non‑visual XR, relying on multimodal cues to anchor their understanding. As contributions, we provide an empirical characterization of a non‑visual XR game for children and distilled lessons for designing and researching future non-visual XR play experiences.