Andromeda — An audio-tactile gaming system for people with visual impairments
Industrial Design, Interaction Design
Andromeda is an audio-tactile gaming system that uses non-visual interactions to include people with visual impairments into the world of gaming. Innovations like variable haptic responses, spatial audio, and quantised feedback create virtual non-visual worlds whilst also feeling familiar to existing gamers.
People with visual impairments (VI) want to enjoy the same leisures as everyone else; however, due to a general neglect for VI users, 1 in 4 people with VI feel they have little choice in how they spend their free time. Gaming is one such leisure that has typically excluded people with VI through a lack of accessible hardware and software. As a result, the blind gaming community is small and often relies on workarounds to play video games. Therefore, we sought to innovate a more inclusive gaming experience.
Year
2019
Awards
Gold Product/Industrial Design Award — Creative Conscience (2020)
Exhibitions
Great Exhibition Road Festival (2019)
Contributions
Industrial Design
Interaction Design
User Research
Visual Identity
Interaction Design
User Research
Visual Identity
Navigating virtual worlds
Visual contrast, accents, and orientated buttons build on the traditional gaming experience, whist specific non-visual tools introduce new ways of exploring digital spaces. Haptic feedback wrist straps allows users to discern orientation and intensity; texture pads allows users to feel specific signals like numbers, warnings, and in-game textures; and spatial audio output enhances the immersive experience during gameplay. To accompany the hardware, we designed a gaming marketplace for mobile devices to allow users to play audio games without need to invest in expensive consoles. And we developed and tested a functional gaming controller and a sample game that can be played entirely blind. As a result of these innovations, people with VI can play traditionally inaccessible genres like racing or navigation based games.
A human-centred design process
Through an iterative process of ideation, development, and testing, we engaged with gamers and non-gamers with VI to understand the problems and opportunities for design interventions. Our idea was to create dedicated gaming hardware that expands on the non-visual output of games whilst also enriching social gameplay between sighted and non-sighted people without feeling like a lesser experience. This principle of inclusivity traversed all touchpoints, from the hardware design and gaming experience to the packaging and sound design.
