Interactive virtual acoustic environments for blind children

摘要

Blind children tend to represent spatial environments with cognitive difficulty. The absence of visual stimuli processing impedes the construction of rich representations of the surrounding space. This can be decreased if they are exposed to interactive experiences with acoustic stimuli delivered through spatialized sound software complemented with cognitive tasks tailored to accomplish richer representations. A few studies have approached this issue by using interactive applications that integrate virtual reality and cognitive tasks to enhance spatial orientation skills. The aim of this research has been to design interactive software based on spatialized sound to help blind learners to construct cognitive spatial structures.