Blind Hero, Guitar Hero for the blind
A blind player testing our game
What?
We developed a modification of the popular guitar hero clone frets on fire which allows visually impaired to play this game using a haptic glove.Why?
There are approximately 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States, including an estimated 1.3 million people who are legally blind. According to a 2008 report NPD, 63 percent of the U.S. population play games. The majority of games are inaccessible to visually impaired but some audio games exist. Audio games are extremely well suited for the blind, and some notable games have been developed such as finger dance and audiodyssey. Guitar Hero is a popular music/rhythm game developed by Red Octane, that lets the player use a guitar-shaped controller with various colored buttons to simulate the playing of rock music. It's a music game but it relies upon being able to see. The game continuously provides a visual stimuli (dots on the screen that have to be played), upon which the player responds to by pressing the buttons on the guitar controller. If the player presses the correct combination it will hear the correct guitar riff for that part of the song. Because it relies upon being able to see, visually disbled cannot play the game. We developed a version of guitar hero that replaces visual stimuli with haptic feedback through a glove that we designed.The Glove
The design of the glove is motivated by being able to preserve as much as the original interaction as possible. The idea was to use a pager engines most commonly found in cell phones to provide haptic feedback. Whenever a pager engine buzzes, the button your finger is on must be pressed. The original guitar hero controller has 5 buttons which the player activates using only four fingers. The design of the guitar makes it very hard to press the fifth button with the thumb. We cannot attach more than one pager to each finger, leaving us no options than only to use four buttons and having to ignore the dots on the fifth fret, this means you cannot play songs on the hard level. A FTDI USB/UART chipset is used to control each engine through a USB port.
the haptic glove