Two Decades of Touchable and Walkable Virtual Reality for Blind and Visually Impaired People: A High-Level Taxonomy

  • Although most readers associate the term virtual reality (VR) with visually appealing entertainment content, this technology also promises to be helpful to disadvantaged people like blind or visually impaired people. While overcoming physical objects’ and spaces’ limitations, virtual objects and environments that can be spatially explored have a particular benefit. To give readers a complete, clear and concise overview of current and past publications on touchable and walkable audio supplemented VR applications for blind and visually impaired users, this survey paper presents a high-level taxonomy to cluster the work done up to now from the perspective of technology, interaction and application. In this respect, we introduced a classification into small-, medium- and large-scale virtual environments to cluster and characterize related work. Our comprehensive table shows that especially grounded force feedback devices for haptic feedback (‘small scale’) were strongly researched in different applications scenarios and mainly from anAlthough most readers associate the term virtual reality (VR) with visually appealing entertainment content, this technology also promises to be helpful to disadvantaged people like blind or visually impaired people. While overcoming physical objects’ and spaces’ limitations, virtual objects and environments that can be spatially explored have a particular benefit. To give readers a complete, clear and concise overview of current and past publications on touchable and walkable audio supplemented VR applications for blind and visually impaired users, this survey paper presents a high-level taxonomy to cluster the work done up to now from the perspective of technology, interaction and application. In this respect, we introduced a classification into small-, medium- and large-scale virtual environments to cluster and characterize related work. Our comprehensive table shows that especially grounded force feedback devices for haptic feedback (‘small scale’) were strongly researched in different applications scenarios and mainly from an exocentric perspective, but there are also increasingly physically (‘medium scale’) or avatar-walkable (‘large scale’) egocentric audio-haptic virtual environments. In this respect, novel and widespread interfaces such as smartphones or nowadays consumer grade VR components represent a promising potential for further improvements. Our survey paper provides a database on related work to foster the creation process of new ideas and approaches for both technical and methodological aspects.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author:Julian KreimeierORCiD, Timo GötzelmannORCiD
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/mti4040079
ISSN:2414-4088
Parent Title (English):Multimodal Technologies and Interaction
Publisher:MDPI AG
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Reviewed:Begutachtet/Reviewed
Release Date:2024/11/13
Volume:4
Issue:4
Article Number:79
institutes:Fakultät Informatik
Licence (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International
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