There are two things that make optometrist and neuroscientist Lotfi Merabet’s new computer game unusual: The various rooms and corridors in the game exactly mirror a real place, and players aren’t able to navigate by looking at graphics on-screen. Instead, players must rely entirely on different sounds that tell them where doors, walls, jewels and monsters lay in wait.Merabet and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School and the University of Chile designed the game for — and tested the game with — visually impaired people. And they found something interesting about their players when they later took the gamers to the real building on which the game was based. Although the researchers hadn’t told the study participants to remember the game’s layout, they found that those who played the game excelled at independently navigating the real building.
The researchers’ study shows the promise of audio maps helping to solve a real problem for the blind, said Gordon Legge, who directs the Laboratory for Low-Vision Research at the University of Minnesota, is visually impaired, and was not involved in Merabet’s study. “People who are visually impaired are often anxious about going to new places. That’s a big issue,” Legge said. “If there were software methods to explore and learn a place before they go, it could be quite advantageous.”
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via Tumblr How a Video Game Assists the Visually Impaired
