Uncovering Visually Impaired Gamers' Preferences for Spatial Awareness Tools Within Video Games

TL;DR

This study investigates four leading spatial awareness tools for visually impaired gamers, revealing their strengths, limitations, and the importance of customization to improve gaming experiences.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how different SATs assist VIPs, highlighting the need for better position and orientation conveyance and customization options.

Findings

VIPs prioritize position and orientation information from SATs.

Current SATs do not effectively convey position and orientation.

VIPs highly value customization of SATs.

Abstract

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.