The researchers who designed this study were interested in improving the technology available to blind people that can be used to build the skills needed to navigate unfamiliar environments. With this goal, they created an auditory game that involves navigating a virtual version of a building, finding jewels, and successfully removing them from the building without encountering monsters that steal the jewels and place them in a new location. The researchers set out to test how performance in the game would relate to participants' ability to successfully navigate a physical building in real life.
Seven participants ages 16–17 participated in the study. All had been blind prior to the age of three and rated themselves as strong users of technology. Participants wore blindfolds during the study to reduce any differences across participants that could be due to residual vision.
All participants were given 60 minutes of playtime in a game in which they navigated an environment modeled after the real-world building in which the experimental sessions took place. Using audio cues, participants navigated the virtual environment using keystrokes and were tasked with finding jewels and taking them to the nearest exit. The auditory cues in the game provided spatial, orientation, and distance information to participants. After the game play session, participants were taken to the building on which the virtual environment was modeled. They were asked to do two sets of 10 tasks. In set one, participants had to find their way to a predetermined room in the building and correctly indicate when they had reached the designated room. In set two, participants were tasked with finding the nearest of three exits from predetermined starting points in the building. Researchers also compared participant performance in the jewel tasks in the game to performance in the real-world navigation tasks.
In set one of the real-world tasks, participants located the correct room in an average of 70% of the trials. In set two of the real-world tasks, participants successfully located any exit in an average of 97% of the trials and the nearest exit in an average of 71% of the trials. There was a significant, positive correlation between the number of points that participants won in the game and success in all three real world navigation tasks. Years of orientation and mobility training prior to participation were not significantly related to performance on the real-world tasks.
