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Improving the Audio Game-Playing Performances of People with Visual Impairments Through Multimodal Training
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Balan, Oana Moldoveanu, Alin Moldoveanu, Florica Nagy, Hunor Wersényi, György Unnpórsson, Rúnar |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | More than 285 million people worldwide suffer from a certain degree of visual impairment (that is, blindness or low vision), of which 40 million are totally blind, according to statistics from the World Health Organization (2015). Some people with vision loss are affected by the lack of social involvement, a sedentary, home-confined lifestyle, as well as the inability to take care of themselves (Constancio, 2010). Effective assistive solutions can improve mobility, cardinality, and social integration. A detailed representation of the environment can improve the navigational skills of visually impaired people (Afonso et al., 2010). In compensation for the lack of sight, visually impaired individuals must rely more on alternative sensory modalities such as hearing and touch. This need led to the idea of integrating auditory and haptic (tactile and kinesthetic) stimuli into the development of assistive devices in order to create and deliver a thorough representation of the surrounding space (Jaijongrak, Kumazawa, & Thiemjarus, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the improvements that occur in the sound-localization performance and elementary virtual-environment navigational skills of people with visual impairments as a result of training. Through sound-localization training, visually impaired subjects develop improved spatial-auditory performances which are reflected by more accurate representations of environments and enhanced navigational skills. We propose a realistic, immersive, feedback-rich, user-centered, and motivational ludic-based approach to training through virtual games. This approach will enable people with visual impairments to develop sound-localization skills, acquire situational knowledge from audio cues, collect directional information, and develop auditory-based spatial understanding and virtual navigational skills in a dynamic and interactive way. Training sound localization through audio games Many experiments have demonstrated that audio game-based training can be a reliable strategy for improving spatial-auditory resolution in virtual environments (Balan, Moldoveanu, & Moldoveanu, 2015; Sanchez, Saenz, Pascual-Leone, & Merabet, 2010; Zahorik, Bangayan, Sundareswaran, Wang, & Tam, 2006). In the experiment presented by Blum, Katz, and Warusfel (2004), a proprioceptive feedback method was used to help the blindfolded subjects manipulate sound sources located at their hand position (a position that has the advantage of being egocentric for the user). In the training session (designed as a game-like scenario), the subjects were required to search for animal sounds hidden around them. Using a positional hand-tracked ball (the sound being spatialized at the center of the ball), they were required to search the perceived direction of the sound. When the subject identified the correct location, pink noise (a signal with power spectral density inversely proportional to the signal frequency) was used as primary sound stimulus was replaced by a sound that was similar to that produced by an animal, and the next direction was generated having as a reference point the previous sound source location. In this way, the subjects were provided with continuous auditory feedback and could explore their entire sphere of perception and action. The experimental results concluded that the angular error was reduced by 6.1 degrees. In Honda et al. (2007), the transfer effects of playing an audio game were analyzed in a sound-localization experiment in which two groups of subjects participated: a group that used generic head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), and another group that used individualized HRTFs. The HRTFs are a measure of the sound transformation from the source to the listener's ears (Meshram et al., 2014; Spagnol, Geronazzo, Rocchesso, & Avanzini, 2013) that are highly dependent on the anatomical characteristics of the listener's body (size and shape of the pinna, head, and torso). … |
| Starting Page | 148 |
| Ending Page | 164 |
| Page Count | 17 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1177/0145482x1711100206 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1137602.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://opinvisindi.is/bitstream/handle/20.500.11815/704/Improving%20the%20audio%20game...Post-print.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=3 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1177/0145482x1711100206 |
| Volume Number | 111 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
