An interactive training game using 3D sound for visually impaired people

The number of visually impaired people is increasing year by year. Although attention has been given to the needs of people with disabilities, most of the discussion has focused on social welfare, while talk about assistive technology for people with disabilities is rare. The blind need training courses for reconstruction and rehabilitation. Orientation and mobility (O and M) training is important for visually impaired people, teaching safe, efficient and effective travel skills. Skills learned from O and M training courses can help the blind walk on the street safely. Crossing the street is especially dangerous, since blind people cannot see traffic lights, and rely mostly on sound for information about their environment. Thus, learning to recognize the varied sounds of vehicles and determining the direction and speed of moving vehicles is critical. In this paper, we propose an interactive game with 3D sound that simulates a busy street environment. The proposed game tries to build a virtual environment with 3D sound to help visually impaired people learn to cross the street safely. As the proposed training game is designed for the blind, the technologies of Kinect and Text-to-Speech (TTS) are used in the human-computer interface in the proposed game, so that they can use the game independently.