Spatial Awareness Tools for Visually Impaired Gamers
Spatial Awareness Tools for Visually Impaired Gamers
researcher @ columbia computer enabled abilities lab
researcher @ columbia computer enabled abilities lab
Mainstream 3D video games are largely inaccessible to visually impaired players (VIPs) because they lack crucial accessibility tools. One way to provide greater accessibility is by providing players with a sense of spatial awareness of their surroundings.
To address this challenge, we investigated four leading approaches to facilitating spatial awareness that represent a broad range of design choices — a smartphone map, a whole-room shockwave, a directional scanner, and a simple audio menu of points-of-interest — and uncovered new insights into this class of game accessibility tools.
goal.
I was a researcher contributing to user research and 3D game design for the Computer Enabled Abilities Lab at Columbia University under Professor Brian Smith.
my role.
duration.
May 2021 - September 2021
the team.
Vishnu Nair, Brian Ma, Ricardo Gonzalez, Yicheng He, Mason Hayes, Hannah Huddleston, Matthew Donnelly, Brian Smith
project type.
user research, user testing, 3D game design
publications.
Uncovering Visually Impaired Gamers' Preferences for Spatial Awareness Tools Within Video Games
ACM ASSETS 2022 (Accept Rate: 26.5%)
Towards a Generalized Acoustic Minimap for Visually-Impaired Gamers
ACM UIST 2021 (Accept Rate: 21%)
"Spatial awareness," as used in our work, refers to a user's awareness of their surrounding environment and how they are situated within that environment. We performed our investigation with respect to 6 distinct aspects of spatial awareness that we identified through existing research in cognitive map formation and spatial awareness for people with vision impairments within the physical world:
The scale of an area.
The shape of an area.
The user's own position & orientation within an area.
The presence of items within the area.
The arrangement of items within the area.
Areas adjacent to the player's current area.
current approaches to spatial awareness.
With our user study, we wanted to understand what aspects of spatial awareness VIPs find important and how well today's SAT approaches facilitate the various aspects of spatial awareness. Game designers and developers can benefit from having a clearer idea as to which SAT(s) they should pick to integrate within their games, especially since they often have limited resources and thus cannot implement everything.
We investigated 4 approaches to giving VIPs spatial awareness of their surroundings, and built out these systems through Unity:
user study.
smartphone map
a smartphone-based, touchscreen map that represents the use of tactile maps & displays to grant spatial awareness.
directional scanner
taken from our previous work with NavStick which repurposes a game controller's right thumb stick to allow a user to "look around" in any direction they wish.
whole-room shockwave
an acoustic room-based shockwave utility inspired by echolocation techniques.
simple audio menu
that lists out the contents of the area that the player is currently in and is used in many "audiogames" created for visually impaired players.
To investigate these approaches, we created a 3D third-person adventure game called Dungeon Escape, which consists of four levels set within an indoor dungeon environment. Players must reach a goal checkpoint in each level by finding objects (such as keys) that allow them to clear obstacles (such as locks). We performed this study with 9 visually impaired participants, who were given one of the four tools to use in each level. We observed each participant’s performance via remote sessions and obtained participants' sentiments via a series of questionnaires.
study methods.
dungeon levels.
zoom interviews.
study results.
In terms of the relative importance of the 6 types of spatial awareness to VIPs:
Position & orientation: Was the most important in that it was always helpful in knowing their current situation within the area as part of planning future actions.
Item presence, item arrangement, and adjacent areas awareness: There was a 3-way tie between these types which participants thought could help, but could also be too much information at times.
Area scale and shape awareness: Finally, tied at the very bottom were these types, which participants thought were unnecessary much of the time.
In terms of how well the 4 SATs facilitated the six types of spatial awareness:
Participants felt that none of the four tools excelled at communicating position & orientation: Despite position & orientation being the most important types of spatial awareness, participants generally felt that they were unable to clearly ascertain where they were within the room and the world at large using any of the tools.
Participants desired the ability to combine tools and customize their experience using the SATs: See the full paper for all of our results.
Our findings reveal several implications: VIPs will benefit greatly from further work in creating an effective tool for communicating position & orientation, and SATs should embrace customizability as a core feature. Furthermore, our investigations with tool combinations yielded that the combination of the directional scanner and the simple audio menu together gives players the greatest spatial awareness — that is, these two tools together provide better spatial awareness than any one tool by itself.
Beyond video games, we also see similar studies within the physical world to evaluate navigation tools built for blind and low vision users within physical world environments.
With our findings, we hope that accessible game designers will have a better understanding as to how SATs can provide a fulfilling yet accessible experience for VIPs within their games and thus open them up to an audience who may otherwise have been unable to play those very games.
learnings.
the lab.
Thanks for checking out my work! To see more work from CEAL @ Columbia University, click the link below :)
