Equal Access To Racing Video Games Developed For Blind Gamers

PhD student at Columbia Engineering in Computer Science, Brian A. Smith, has designed the racing auditory display (RAD) to allow gamers who are visually challenged to play the similar kinds of racing games that normal people can play with the similar control, speed, and enthusiasm that normal people experience. The audio-supported interface, which a user can hear employing a normal pair of headphones, can be incorporated by developers into just about any video game of racing, making a well-liked genre of games evenly available to individuals who are blind.

“The RAD is the initial system to make it likely to play an actual 3D game for racing for users who are blind with practical vehicle physics, full 3D graphics, a standard PlayStation 4 controller, and complex racetracks,” claims Smith, who operated on the project with T.C. Chang Professor of Computer Science, Shree Nayar. “It is not a downgraded variant of a racing game personalized particularly to users who are blind.”

While there are a lot of games in the market appropriate for the blind, most of them are loaded with opposing sources of data that users must filter through, slowing the fun down from playing the game. Others are variants of popular games so basic that a blind user does nothing more than follow instructions. There has been a basic exchange between a game’s pace and preserving the complete complexity of the game when making it accessible to blind.

“Our difficulty was to offer visually challenged users sufficient data regarding the game so that they can have the similar sense of thrill and control that normal users have, but not so much data that they might get beleaguered by overload of audio or laid down in only recognizing out how to understand the sounds,” claimed Smith to the media in an interview.