Developing a navigational 3D audio game with hierarchical levels of difficulty for the visually impaired players

The Binaural Navigation Game is a 3D audio game with hierarchical levels of difficulty that can be used by both normal sighted or visually impaired players. The purpose of the game is to test and train the sound localization skills, to entertain and to provide an alternative to the common video games available on the market nowadays. The sonification technique is based on the perception of 3D binaural sounds synthesized with non-individualized Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) and on the inversely proportional sound intensity encoding of distance. Furthermore, we use an original method based on the simultaneous perception of two types of noise that aims to reduce the incidence of front-back confusions. This game has been tested in an experimental procedure (comprised of a pre-test, a hapticauditory feedback based training and a post-test session) in which 10 visually impaired subjects (with a percent of residual vision ranging from 0% to 15%) have participated. This paper aims to present the design and development of the Binaural Navigation Game, the Game Editor (an application that allows the experimenter to set the layout of new sets of levels) and the Binaural Game Analyzer, a tool used to visualize and evaluate the players’ performances..