Audio-based snake game for visually impaired children

Computer games are possibly the most utilized form of entertainment for children and young adults today. For obvious reasons, the availability of this type of entertainment is limited for visually impaired children but this can be changed by carefully designing games that are suitable for that target group. This requires the use of audio and haptic feedback rather than the more traditional visual representation in games. Naturally, these games are meant to provide entertainment but here they can also be seen as an educational tool where the games aid the development skills for auditory orientation.

The objective of this project is to design, implement and evaluate an audio-based variant of the classical game Snake. The basic outline of the game is as follows. The player should be able to navigate an enclosed 2-D space and search for a target nibble. The distance from a boundary should be indicated by a suitable sound as the player navigates around the space while the location of the nibble should be indicated by a sound that is localized in space.

Assignment



• Understand the human auditory system for localizing sounds and computer methods for simulating localized sounds. 
• Implement a prototype of the game in MATLAB with a suitable interface; 
• Evaluate the game using adequate subject-based experiments.

Contact

dr. Nikolay Gaubitch

Signal Processing Systems Group

Department of Microelectronics

Last modified: 2021-03-28