Virtual reality as orientation and mobility aid for blind people

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the past 15 years of research and development (R&D) on the role of virtual environments (VEs) as an orientation and mobility (O&M) aid to enhance skills and to train people who are blind or newly blind. Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes and examines studies of 21 VE systems developed specifically to help people who are blind improve their O&M skills. These VE systems, equipped to supply appropriate perceptual and conceptual spatial information through haptic and auditory sensorial channels, are mainly focussed on two goals: helping congenitally blind or late blind persons to collect spatial information in advance and supporting people who are newly blind in practicing their O&M skills during rehabilitation. The R&D studies represented in these 21 studies were examined along three dimensions: descriptive information, system, and research. Findings – This paper highlights weaknesses and strengths of VE systems that have been developed in the past 15 years as O&M aids for people who are blind. These results have the potential to influence future R&D in this field. Originality/value – The author hopes that this paper will influence future R&D in this field and lead to accessible O&M VEs in practice and research.

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

“…The latter scenario does represent a similar situation (as discussed in [5]), but the users' task specific requirements and abilities of (physically) visually impaired users are oftentimes different from actually sighted users [6]. In order to be able to build upon previous work [7][8][9] and to be able to follow a consistent and precise focus in the following, we define the term visually impaired as users with impaired vision due to a physical impairment.…”

“…Research in VR for blind people are certainly not a new phenomenon, although technology and methodology are naturally evolving. There are already some works that have summarized and analyzed this development at its time [6][7][8][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. The oldest survey from Vincent L'evesque in 2005 [21] gives an overview of the state of knowledge at that time on how blind people can be supported by means of haptics.…”

“…Therefore, we decided to name archetypical application scenarios to underline which generic spatial information was mainly used for each cluster. Generally speaking, VR applications for blind and visually impaired users can consist basically of any generic spatial information; for example, 3D haptic mathematical graphs in an education context (e.g., [19,30,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52]) or virtual proxies of real spaces ( [7,16,[41][42][43][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63]). Especially, the knowledge gain and transfer in the latter context when training orientation and mobility aspects in VEs have been extensively analyzed.…”

Virtual O&M: A far north queensland innovation

“…Virtual reality has long been popular in the game and entertainment industry. Over the last few years, the interest in virtual reality based learning tools for SVI has increased considerably (Lahav et al 2015). Virtual reality computer applications (Balan et al 2014), audio based games (Connors et al 2014b), haptic (Lahav, 2014), tactile (Brayda et al 2013), andsonic (Bujacz et al 2012;Seki and Sato, 2011) technologies have all been investigated with the aim of aiding the development of O&M skills for SVI.…”

Turning a Blind Eye: An Exploration of Non-Visual Game Design

“…The route model is based on linear recognition of spatial features… blind people tend to explore and navigate spaces mainly using the route model. (Lahav, 2014) What this means is that when understanding and navigating space, visually impaired people tend to understand the space as a list of instructions e.g. go forward through the door and turn left.…”