The forest is still — until, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a butterfly flutter into view. At first it is barely perceptible, but as I watch the butterfly more intently, the trees around it darken and the insect grows brighter. The more I marvel at it, the more marvelous it becomes, making it impossible for me to look away. Before long the entire forest recedes, and the butterfly explodes into a red starburst, like a fireworks display. Everything goes dark. Then, dozens of white dots swarm around me. On my left, they are just dots. On my right, they leave long trails of spaghetti-like light. The contrast makes me acutely conscious that the present is never experienced as a mathematical instant; it has some duration, and the perception of that can vary with context.

The sensation evaporates as soon as I take off my headset.

This immersive virtual-reality (VR) experience was a preliminary look at “Beholder,” an art installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in September that sought to recreate how autistic people perceive the world. It is now on display at the gallery that commissioned it, Birmingham Open Media. The project’s creator, Matt Clark, has a severely autistic 15-year-old son, Oliver. “He can’t talk; his behaviors are extremely challenging,” says Clark, creative director of United Visual Artists, an art and design group based in London. Clark built “Beholder” so he and others could see the world through his son’s eyes. He collaborated with artists who either are on the spectrum or have family members who are.

The project exemplifies a new approach to the use of VR for autism. For more than two decades, scientists have experimented with the technology to set up controlled scenarios to study autistic traits. At the same time, some teams have used VR to create role-playing environments for practicing social skills. Increasingly, however, people with autism are using VR to convey their own experiences, both to raise awareness of the condition and to capture the cognitive and perceptual differences that characterize it. Some experts hope these efforts will lead to new research collaborations and applications.

These immersive experiences are, in many ways, the digital equivalent of Temple Grandin’s narratives, which were among the earliest first-person descriptions of autism. A dozen or so projects that can be viewed online use loud noises or flashing lights to try to reproduce sensations such as sensory overload at a shopping mall, office meeting or family get-together. Slightly more elaborate efforts, such as the trailer for Carly Fleischmann’s book, “Carly’s Voice: Breaking Through Autism,” and the animation “Listen,” layer the effects over a storyline. But a few are especially ambitious in aiming to provide specific sensory impressions. Examples of the latter are “Beholder” and an augmented-reality system created by researcher Yukie Nagai and her colleagues at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Osaka, Japan.

Proponents of VR argue that no other medium comes as close to putting you in someone else’s shoes. “Having a perceptual experience — that’s something we haven’t been able to do without VR,” says Albert “Skip” Rizzo, research professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and a pioneer of using VR in psychiatry. “You can watch a movie, but it’s different than walking around and having your perceptual experience,” Rizzo says.

These projects are not uncontroversial, however. So-called ‘disability simulation exercises’ — blindfolding people to demonstrate vision impairment or making them use crutches to appreciate mobility challenges — are mainstays of diversity training. But they fail to capture the social isolation that is often part of a disability, and they can evoke pity and condescension, driving people apart rather than together.

Simulations of autistic experience have been met with a similar ambivalence. They also must confront the basic metaphysical question of whether subjective experience is something that can ever be shared. “I can understand that a neurotypical parent might be desperate to understand their autistic child’s point of view,” says Susan Kruse, gallery supervisor at Birmingham Open Media, who is autistic. “But how can anyone get inside another person’s mind and experience what they experience?”