Two Decades of Touchable and Walkable Virtual Reality for Blind and Visually Impaired People: A High-Level Taxonomy

Abstract

Although most readers associate the term virtual reality (VR) with visually appealing entertainment content, this technology also promises to be helpful to disadvantaged people like blind or visually impaired people. While overcoming physical objects’ and spaces’ limitations, virtual objects and environments that can be spatially explored have a particular benefit. To give readers a complete, clear and concise overview of current and past publications on touchable and walkable audio supplemented VR applications for blind and visually impaired users, this survey paper presents a high-level taxonomy to cluster the work done up to now from the perspective of technology, interaction and application. In this respect, we introduced a classification into small-, medium- and large-scale virtual environments to cluster and characterize related work. Our comprehensive table shows that especially grounded force feedback devices for haptic feedback (‘small scale’) were strongly researched in different applications scenarios and mainly from an exocentric perspective, but there are also increasingly physically (‘medium scale’) or avatar-walkable (‘large scale’) egocentric audio-haptic virtual environments. In this respect, novel and widespread interfaces such as smartphones or nowadays consumer grade VR components represent a promising potential for further improvements. Our survey paper provides a database on related work to foster the creation process of new ideas and approaches for both technical and methodological aspects.

The visual information available in virtual reality

“…For instance, artists 4 Another reason why virtual reality is not necessarily a kind of picture perception is that, given the appropriate hardware, designers of virtual reality environments can choose to present the user with non-visual sources of information. Blind and partially sighted users of virtual reality can in principle become immersed in a virtual environment that is presented exclusively via auditory and haptic feedback, with no access to optical information at all (Kreimeier and Götzelmann, 2020). We thank Farid Zahnoun for pointing this out.…”

Virtual Reality Systems as an Orientation Aid for People Who Are Blind to Acquire New Spatial Information

“…Research and development of orientation VR for people who are blind have been conducted over the past 25 years. A survey [ 5 ] that included VR systems for people who are blind and visually impaired over the past two decades clustered the VR systems into a three-level taxonomy based on exploration interaction, perspective, application scenario, and evaluation. These VR systems compensate for lacking visual information through haptic and/or auditory feedback.…”

Uma ferramenta para a customização de ambientes virtuais para práticas de Orientação e Mobilidade

“…As pessoas cegas ou com a visão fortemente comprometida podem usar outros sentidos para compensar a escassez de informação visual: um exemplo é a audição, que possibilita estabelecer relações de distância e direção, usadas para identificação de dicas e pontos importantes [6], permitindo um melhor desenvolvimento das habilidades cognitivas. Com base nessas evidências, algumas pesquisas começaram a investigar o áudio 3D para permitir a construção de estruturas mentais espaciais, sugerindo que as imagens espaciais não dependem apenas da informação visual [5] [2]. Exemplos de habilidades aprimoradas com essas abordagens são autolocalização (por exemplo, identificar a direção do som e saber contextualizá-la) e orientação sonora (e.g., determinar o curso de um som de objeto em movimento e se mover em direção a ele).…”