Loud and Clear: the VR game without visuals

While visual impairment is relatively common, most sightedpeople have no idea of what it is like to live without one of the most heav-ily utilised senses. We developed the gameLoud and Clearin order tohave them experience the difficulties of being visually impaired, as wellas to put in evidence the abilities blind people have developed, whichsighted people mostly lack. In this game without visuals, the player hasto rely solely on audio to complete objectives within the game. The gameconsists of a number of puzzle rooms the player has to solve. These puz-zles illustrate the challenges of being blind in a playful setting, and chal-lenge the player to use different auditory skills that are key to achievingobjectives without vision, such as sound localisation, sound recognitionand spatial orientation. The game uses audio spatialisation techniquesto give the player a realistic and immersive auditive experience. Prelim-inary tests of this game show that players acknowledge the initial highdifficulty of `living' as a blind person, to which eventually they were ableto somehow adapt. In addition, players reported feeling both immersedand educated by the experience.

@InProceedings { BPGTBSBB19,
  author       = "Baas, Berend and Peer, Dennis van and Gerling, Jan and Tavasszy, Matthias and Buskulic, Nathan and Salamon,
                  Nestor Z. and Balint, J. Timothy and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Loud and Clear: the VR game without visuals",
  booktitle    = "Games and Learning Alliance",
  series       = "LNCS",
  volume       = "11899",
  pages        = "180 -- 190",
  year         = "2019",
  publisher    = "Springer International Publishing",
  note         = "8th International Conference GALA 2019, Athens, Greece, November 27-29, 2019",
  keywords     = "Best Paper Award",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2019/BPGTBSBB19"
}