Audio Navigation: Phase 5
Project: Emergence and Navigating Space

Our world is a visually centered place, most of our navigation, decision making and interaction is based off of visual cues. In out project we wanted to shift focus onto another eaqually usefull but often overlooked sense, the sense of hearing. To strip away any ability to use the other senses we created a video game with no visuals that players have to use sound to navigate a virtual space. Think of ita as being blind for 20 minutes or so. Players will be at first frustrated that they can not discern where they are going but will soon learn that it is easier to to navigate with only hearing than they first thought.
Since creating this project we realized that blind children are completely excluded from the video game craze that is sweeping the world, and hope that perhaps we could further develop this project into a full fledge game for blind kids.

Below is a 3:00 minute sample of the audio from our game, that takes you through the introduction and sets the player off to wander the world by themselves to search for windchimes to bring back to the monastary. For the full Effect of the 3D sound we recomend wearing good quality headphones.


To play the game you need to own a copy of HL2 or anyother Source Engine Game and the Download for the mod is available here.

Fri, Mar 21, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Emergence and Navigating Space

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