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Sensory substitution to enable the visually impaired to play an affordable wearable mobile game

Published: 07 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Sensory substitution allows the visually impaired to regain access to the missing visual information by having the information processed by another intact sense (such as touch and hearing). In this paper, we present a low-cost wearable mobile game that utilizes auditory-visual sensory substitution to engage players.
In particular, we employed an array of electrical auditory stimulators attached in a thin helmet worn by the visually impaired player. Our testing with blindfolded sighted players demonstrated the potential of our design in terms of accessibility and ease of use, and the effectiveness of sensory substitution.

References

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Paul Bach-y-Rita, Carter C. Collins, Frank A. Saunders, Benjamin White, Lawrence Scadden. 1969. Vision substitution by tactile image projection. Nature 221, 5184: 963--964.
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Paul Bach-y-Rita and Stephen W, Kercel. 2013. Sensory substitution and the human--machine interface. Trends in Cognitive Sci. 7, 12: 541--546.
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Joy Kim and Jonathan Ricaurte. 2011. TapBeats: accessible and mobile casual gaming. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS'11, 285--286.
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Lauren R. Milne, Cynthia L. Bennett, Shiri Azenkot, Richard E. Ladner. 2014. BraillePlay: educational smartphone games for blind children. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS'14, 137--144.
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Tony Morelli, John Foley, Eelke Folmer. 2010. VI-bowling: a tactile spatial exergame for individuals with visual impairments. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS'10, 179--186.
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John R. Porter and Julie A. Kientz. 2013. An empirical study of issues and barriers to mainstream video game accessibility. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS'13, 3.
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Kyle Rector, Cynthia L. Bennett, Julie A. Kientz. 2013. Eyes-free yoga: an exergame using depth cameras for blind & low vision exercise. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS'13, 1--8.
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Ramiro Velázquez. 2010. Wearable assistive devices for the blind. In Wearable and Autonomous Biomedical Devices and Systems for Smart Environment: Issues and Characterization, Aime Lay-Ekuakille and Subhas C. Mukhopadhyay (Eds.), LNEE 75, Springer, 331--349.
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T. Westin. 2004. Game accessibility case study: terraformers---a real-time 3d graphic game. In Proc. of the 5th Int. Conf. on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies.
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WHO, Visual impairment and blindness - Fact Sheet No.282. 2014. Retrieved April 5, 2015 from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs282/
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Hanlu Ye, Meethu Malu, Uran Oh, Leah Findlater. 2014. Current and future mobile and wearable device use by people with visual impairments. In Proc. of ACM CHI'2014, 3123--3132.
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Bei Yuan and Eelke Folmer. 2008. Blind hero: enabling guitar hero for the visually impaired. In Proc. of ACM ASSETS '08, 169--176.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      UbiComp/ISWC'15 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
      September 2015
      1626 pages
      ISBN:9781450335751
      DOI:10.1145/2800835
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 07 September 2015

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      Author Tags

      1. mobile game
      2. speaker array
      3. visually impaired
      4. wearable

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      UbiComp '15
      Sponsor:
      • Yahoo! Japan
      • SIGMOBILE
      • FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
      • ACM
      • Rakuten Institute of Technology
      • Microsoft
      • Bell Labs
      • SIGCHI
      • Panasonic
      • Telefónica
      • ISTC-PC

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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