Research

• Research objectives – The objective of this research was -

a. To understand the design considerations of developing a gaming application for visually impaired people.

b. To develop an acoustic VR-based gaming application considering the revealed design consideration and user requirements.

c. To evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of the developed application through User Experience (UX) research.

• Research Methodology – 

A design science research (DSR) approach was adopted to address the research objectives. The overall research method was incorporated following five steps: 

a. Awareness of the problem: review literature to understand the problems and limitations

b. Suggestion: requirement elicitation study to reveal the requirements 

c. Development: develop the Game

d. Evaluation: evaluation of the Game 

e. Conclusion: the reflection of the design, development, and evaluation study

• Research challenges: 

The opportunities to approach the target users of this research (visually impaired students) were limited, given that in BD, visually impaired people are mostly neglected and deprived of education. 

• Research findings:

a. An android-based acoustic VR game was developed to stimulate ethical values as well as provide the knowledge for better situational awareness.

b. The evaluation study demonstrated 82% (4.1 out of 5) user satisfaction with the developed game and 90% (9 out of 10) of the users like to recommend the game to another user.

c. The design considerations derived from this research can be useful for developing similar games and applications for visually impaired people.

• Future research prospects:

a. Designing more gaming levels, as well as the expansion of the story narration based on numerous scenarios, all in Bengali and conducting a larger evaluation study by recruiting more participants. 

b. Gathering biomedical data through MRI reports of the user’s cerebrum to validate the system further.

c. Emotion recognition of users from the speech input in the Bengali language can be incorporated.