Blind Nav

Blind Nav is a blind-game useful to train navigation skills in visually impaired people with fun. The project was developed for the 'Sound in Interaction' course at the University of Milan and was inspired by the  ‘Legend of Iris’ game and its related paper. 

Introduction

The purpose of this project involves the creation of the game that you can download from this page and the collection of user data useful for the production of a final statistical report. For this reason, at the end of the game you will be asked to fill in a short questionnaire and to upload the file containing the data collected automatically during the game. All operations will be guided starting from the game.

In case you need to manually reach the questionnaire page, you can find it here [english] and here [italian].

Requirements

Stereo headphones 🎧 or speakers 🔊 and a gamepad 🎮 would be required to play Blind Nav. If you don't have a gamepad, here you can find the mapping between the most important functionalities on the gamepad and on the mouse & keyboard:

GamepadMouse & KeyboardFunctionalityLeft triggerLeft clickRepeat presentation during the tutorialRight triggerRight clickNext presentation during the tutorialStartEscQuit the gameSelectRReset the characterLeft stickWASDMove the characterDirectional keysDirectional keysAdjust the channel volumes

If you run into any problems and are forced to restart the game, write me to know how to skip the tutorial.

⚠️DISCLAMER⚠️

The game could be results difficult and frustrating. The reason is that we tried to make the experience as close as possible to reality. Please be patient and try to finish all the levels. Your contribution will be precious for this research in the field of accessibility for the visually impaired people. Thank you.

Important concepts

• Targets: the goal during the game is to reach a sequence of targets only by hearing sounds while avoiding hitting some obstacles.
• Voices
  • Helper voice: This is the voice that will help the player throughout the overall experience. Its sounds are reproduced without spatiality.
  • Target voice: This is the same as the Helper Voice, but calls the player continuously and its sounds are played spatialized, emitted from the target positions in the direction of the player.
• Obstacles
  • Environmental: They consist of all the objects that make up the virtual world, such as fences, houses, etc. They do not emit any sound, so the player can  only try to memorize their position after hitting them.
  • Safe: If the player touches them, the character's position is reset to a few meters from the obstacle. They make sounds.
  • Dangerous: If the player touches them, the character's position is reset to the last target position reached. They make sounds.
  • Mobile / Fixed: Safe and dangerous obstacles can be moving or stationary, while environmental ones are only stationary.

Levels

The game consists of three levels:

1. Tutorial: The game starts here and the player cannot move. Different sounds are played and the player is asked for some input to check if he is able to correctly recognize the sound emission positions. At the end of this first phase, the player must reach two target positions one after the other just by listening to the associated Target Voices. Between the first and second target, the player can familiarize himself with the character control system and the spatialized audio features by walking in a room with 4 obstacles emitting sounds.
2. Park: In this level the player has to reach four target positions one after the other. The virtual world is made up of environmental obstacles and fixed position obstacles.
3. Town: In this level the player must reach ten target positions one after the other. At this level, however, the world is also enriched with moving obstacles.