| dc.description.abstract | Visually impaired (VI) adolescents often partake less in leisure activities, such as visiting cinemas, theatres, and museums, than their sighted peers. Art can play an important role in developing the intellectual and personal growth of young people. As such, ensuring that the visually impaired have access to museums and their art from a young age is especially important. Technologies such as virtual reality provide users easy access to virtual content. These technologies often rely on ordinary visual interfaces, meaning the visually impaired do not have (unrestricted) access to them. This thesis aims to develop an altered version of a virtual reality museum that can be adequately experienced by visually impaired teenagers.
The virtual reality museum consists of historic figures and artifacts, which can be interacted with to prompt animations, sound effects, or narrative voice-lines. A between-subjects study was designed in order to explore if narrations and spatialized 'reference' audio combined with haptic feedback is a sufficient replacement for the traditional use of vision. Alongside the visually impaired and the sighted version, a blindfolded version was created, which blocks all vision in its entirety and was played by several sighted participants to get supplementary data to that of the visually impaired.
Although significant differences were found in the mean accuracy of each of the three versions, all three participant groups managed to successfully interact with all virtual objects. The pace at which they did this was statistically equivalent, suggesting the adapted interaction method is just as fast to use, just slightly less accurate. An additional steering method was added for the visually impaired version, which uses auditory and haptic feedback to steer players towards specific virtual objects. This method allowed users to find objects even faster, but due to a lack of clear feedback was found to be somewhat confusing. Even though there was no statistical equivalence in audio understanding, presence, and understanding of the environment, the visually impaired participants positively graded these in the qualitative survey. As such, it can be concluded that even though the visually impaired did not have a fully statistically equivalent experience as the others, they were able to adequately experience the virtual reality museum. | |
