In.Line: A Navigation Game For Visually Impaired People

Abstract

In.line is a novel game based on a navigation system, called ARIANNA (pAth Recognition for Indoor Assisted NavigatioN with Augmented perception, [1]), primarily designed for visually impaired people permitting to navigate and find some points of interests in an indoor and outdoor environment by following a path painted or stuck on the floor. The aim of the game is twofold: 1) let the users learn and familiarize with the system, 2) improve blind people spatial skills to let them learn and acquire an allocentric spatial representation. The impact stands in the possibility of enhancing the social inclusion of a large part of the society that is increasing with the aging of the population by augmenting their autonomous mobility. The paper presents the concept design and preliminary evaluation of a game specifically designed for blind people. The evaluation has been performed via qualitative and quantitative tests.