User Study

This project approaches to stimulate non-visual senses in a 3D virtual environment and thus makes it accessible for blind users. We developed a digital game for sighted and unsighted players to compete against each other with different input devices but exactly the same odds. The sighted player focuses on the visual input and can change the environment with his whole body using a Kinect camera. The blind player will experience the virtual environment by using touch input with a haptic device, wind simulation and 3D-Sound. In cooperation with the local blind association we improved the setup iteratively.

In order to test the equality of opportunity for both players we decided to perform several user tests. Because the project is limited in time we developed a user study for sighted players only. The study was devided in several sessions (test runs). In each run two test subjects played against each other. However, to meassure the effectiveness of visual- and non-visual tools (e.g. haptics, 3D sound, wind simulation) to achieve equality of opportunity in terms of odds one of the subjects was blindfolded. Overall the user study covered 30 test runs.

At the end of each session both subjects were interviewed to answer a questionaire which was explicitly developed for this study. In addition to the questionaire also logs were recorded to capture relevant game data such as collisisons, speed and position of both players. The logs alone are not enough to meassure the effectiveness of the tools. Thus, the questionaire was supposed to give insight on the self-assessment of the subjects which can be, in hindsight, compared to the logs to find correlations.

Goals

Results

We are currently working on the analysis of the results.