Sighted players gain spatial awareness within video games through sight and spatial awareness tools (SATs) such as minimaps. Visually impaired players (VIPs), however, must often rely heavily on SATs to gain spatial awareness, especially in complex environments where using rich ambient sound design alone may be insufficient. Researchers have developed many SATs for facilitating spatial awareness within VIPs. Yet this abundance disguises a gap in our understanding about how exactly these approaches assist VIPs in gaining spatial awareness and what their relative merits and limitations are. To address this, we investigate four leading approaches to facilitating spatial awareness for VIPs within a 3D video game context. Our findings uncover new insights into SATs for VIPs within video games, including that VIPs value position and orientation information the most from an SAT; that none of the approaches we investigated convey position and orientation effectively; and that VIPs highly value the ability to customize SATs.
翻译:视觉障碍球员(VIPs)必须经常大量依赖SATs来获得空间意识,特别是在光是使用丰富的环境声音设计可能不够的复杂环境中。研究人员已经开发了许多SATs来促进重要人物的空间意识。然而,这种丰富性掩盖了我们对这些方法如何确切地帮助重要人物获得空间意识及其相对优点和局限性的理解上的差距。为了解决这一问题,我们调查了四种在3D视频游戏背景下促进重要人物空间意识的主要方法。我们的调查结果发现,在视频游戏中,对重要人物的SAT有了新的洞察力,包括贵宾的价值地位和定向信息最主要来自SAT;我们调查的方法没有一种能够有效地传达位置和方向;以及要人高度评价定制SAT的能力。