[nabs-l] Article: Audio-based virtual gaming aims to help the blind navigate, CNet News, April 1, 2013

[Jedi Moerke]

I have a strong suspicion that the videogame in another itself is not what necessarily responsible for increasing success of navigation. I think the video game activates some cognitive processes that traditional instruction does not. I suspect it's the same phenomenon that works instruction discovery. I don't know that for fact, but it's a gas. This message was typed in a hurry using Siri, so please forgive me in advance for grammatical errors.

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 1, 2013, at 11:21 PM, "Humberto Avila" <avila.bert.humberto2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Link:
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57577323-76/audio-based-virtual-gaming-aim
> s-to-help-the-blind-navigate/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title
> 
> Text: Audio-based virtual gaming aims to help the blind navigate
> Using only audio-based cues within the context of a video game metaphor,
> blind users in a study out of Harvard are able to explore a building's
> layout.
> Elizabeth Armstrong Moore
> 
> Blind players were better able to navigate the building in real life than
> their counterparts who'd been introduced to it by walking through it.
> (Credit: Journal of Visualized Experiments) 
> A video game that uses audio cues and computer-generated building layouts
> has proven to be better at improving a blind person's spatial awareness of
> that place than does actually walking them through it, according to new
> research out of Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear
> Infirmary.
> The findings could have implications for how visually impaired people -- and
> possibly those without impairments -- best learn to navigate unknown
> territory.
> "It is a tool to build a map of a place you have never been to before,"
> Lotfi Merabet, the neuroscientist whose team developed the software used in
> the study (which appears in the Journal of Visualized Experiments), told
> Reuters. "The video game not only allows you to build a map in your mind, it
> allows you to interact with it mentally in a way that you wouldn't be able
> to if you were taught explicitly by walking through it."
> Merabet sees the video game as an important step toward revolutionizing
> assisted tech for the visually impaired, of which there are some 285 million
> globally.
> His team tested the game on teens to 45-year-olds who were either
> congenitally blind or had lost their sight. Some participants played the
> game, using audio cues to find hidden jewels in a building that in real life
> is a center for the blind in Newton, Mass. There was an added incentive:
> They had to remove those jewels from the building without being caught by,
> you guessed it, monsters lurking in dark corners. Other participants got to
> actually walk the building itself to learn the lay of the land.
> 
> 
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