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Blind and Visually Impaired Community

Full History - 2020 - 09 - 20 - ID#iwglbr
4
Would it be possible for blind to play competitive FPS games, Minecraft and other arcade games that seem to require sight? (I am thinking about converting visual input to other senses) (self.Blind)
submitted by [deleted]
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Motya105 3 points 2y ago
The device you’re thinking of is called a Sensory Substitution device. Research on using other senses to substitute sight has been done in the US since the 1960s. The culmination of this research is the BrainPort, a device that uses vibrations on the tongue to display shapes, and even large Print letters. You can learn more about it by googling Wicab Brainport, or by listening to the episode of the podcast Radiolab called Seeing With Your Tongue. The Brainport can not react to visual motion enough to enable playing an FPS, since the camera takes greyscale images, and converts them into vibrations of varying length on the tongue. People have tried using musical notes for describing different colors, (to try this out, download the EyeMusic iPhone app, it’s free), but these color-to-audio converters don’t work very well, since they’re impractical in real life situations, (at least for me, as a totally blind person.) The trouble with an FPS is not only object recognition, (aiming and shooting) but also tracking moving enemies, and using the environment for cover/interacting with it, (such as throwing chairs or other objects at enemies to incapacitate them, which would make adaptation very difficult. I hope this helps.
urethanerush 2 points 2y ago
Like u/Motya105 says, sensory substitution is one approach, although current iterations come with limitations. Largely they are not designed around specific use-cases like gaming. However, some have tried implementing sensory substitution directly into the games themselves such as '$1' which proports to be a basic minecraft style game using a depth-map that is sonified using the vOICe-algorithm. You could also try out black and white games using the vOICe and sonifying the screen. The idea could probably work well if significant enough attention was paid to both usability, but also aesthetics and fun, for instance, converting location into pitch might be informative, but do you want to listen to that for prolonged periods of time? Probably not. In your fighting game example, you could have the floor tiles vary in what they sound like when the fighters stand on them, so you have all the spatial location information, but it makes more sense in the context of the game. There are blind-focused games that use 3D sound, like 'a blind legend' which has had some good reviews.
Dantesmansion 1 points 2y ago
I remember seeing a test of someone playing a fighting game that translated the position of the opponent into a beep that changed pitch. I thought it would be better if it used the controller's vibration. It's defiantly possible but I'm not a programmer and it seems like their project never came to anything.
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