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Publication
Virtual Reality to aid Visually Impaired People
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| 2.09 MB | Adobe PDF |
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Abstract(s)
Blindness, the complete loss of eyesight is an issue that has affected people all over the world. With time medical, scientific, and technological advancements were made which have caused the cases of blindness throughout the world to steadily decrease, however, there are still many untreatable cases of blindness. According to the World Health Organization, in 2020, there were at least 2.2 billion people with near or distance vision impairment, with at least 1billion of these cases having moderate or severe vision impairment or blindness. For most people in their everyday lives, the majority of information gathered from the surrounding environment is trough visual senses, unfortunately, blind, or severely visually impaired people lack the ability to gather that information reliably. This often causes the navigation of environments to often be unsafe, unpleasant, and even distressing to blind people. This raises the necessity of providing these people with safe, comfortable tools that allow them to explore and navigate environments and train their orientation and mobility skills.
This solution for exploration, navigation, and interaction with virtual environments, is an immersive 3D application with gamification elements for VR platforms, that allows the exploration of virtual environments. It provides users with a tool that can benefit their lifestyle by allowing a safe space to train their orientation, mobility, and interaction skills with the surrounding environment. This solution is destined to orientation and mobility trainers, institutions to aid the blind, but also to the end user, since it has the potential to enable the interaction with these virtual spaces to be unsupervised. This solution not only allows the navigation of virtual environments but is also heavily focused on promoting the interaction with virtual objects by the users, unlike other existing solutions which are heavily focused on environment navigation only.
A prototype is developed, which consisted in the development of the immersive 3D application for virtual reality, by using a modern all-in-one virtual reality platform which provide head tracking via a headset and hand tracking via two hand controllers, which were used to simulate both a virtual blind cane and a virtual hand which the user controls using his hands. A fully dynamic 3D environment was created that offers the user a safe environment to train, providing him with full audio and haptic feedback allowing him to understand the environment and develop a cognitive mapping of it.
The results of the usability tests performed using this solution proved that it is effective, and users were able to accomplish the objective without any visual feedback. At first users performed usability tests after receiving a set of instructions and a goal to accomplish inside the simulation. After completing the simulation users were asked to answer a questionnaire with a series of questions regarding their performance in the simulation and gave additional feedback for future development of the solution.
This solution features a virtual environment which allows the users to train their motor skills contributing to the user’s quality of life, it also contributes to the scientific field of VR applied to the visual impaired by allowing the user to explore a living environment simulated in real time where he can interact with objects, identify them and their positions based on different feedback provided. This work also defines a set of evaluation metrics that can be used to characterize and evaluate previous and future work in this scientific field, along with defined requirements and objectives of the solution, contributing this way to the future of this scientific research field.
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Keywords
Realidade virtual Internet das coisas Gamificação Jogos de computador Simulação digital Pessoas com deficiência visual