It was a long project but I’m glad I continued doing it and I can finally say how much I proud of the final project. I used my second (and final) project which I did with my project partner Wendy Wang for the Physical Computing class as my final ICM project. We didn’t plan for it, but it was really easy to modify the project, so it can be used for ICM just by adding the arrow keys controls.
To concisely summarize the project - it is a maze that was made with visually impaired people in mind. The player can be guided through the maze only by sounds. For people, whose vision is not affected, the game offers an opportunity to understand how difficult it can be to rely just on hearing sense.
Development process:
Make the maze randomly generated in p5;
Connect the joystick to the maze;
Choose appropriate sounds, edit them in Audition and add them to the maze;
Add instructions and greetings to the game;
Add keyboard controls for remote user-testing;
Playtest with people and make changes accordingly;
Last changes included: making sounds play in sequence, adding sounds for the first position, preventing the player from going further while sounds are still playing and adding concise instructions;
Left to right: Housing, joystick wiring, and maze interface
Features of the Accessible Maze:
The maze is generated randomly every time it’s run;
The complexity of the maze can be changed by changing the size of the grid;
The player’s movement is controlled with the arrow keys on the keyboard;
Greetings and instructions are played when the person first loads the game and can be listened again at any point by pressing Shift key;
By pressing Delete key the instructions can be stopped;
Sounds are played in a list format and the player can't move until the sounds are finished playing;
All the sounds are easily distinguishable, and left and right sounds were made stereo so that they can be played in a left ear or right ear respectively. Unfortunately, the stereo sound is not compatible with some computers or headphones that was indicated during the user-testing. Introduction of four sounds instead of three was more confusing for people, so decided to use only three;
Video of me testing the maze blindfolded
Video of my friend who have never played it before
Feedback from others:
“It’s hard to quickly adjust to a new dominant sense”
“It’s an interesting challenge”
“How you felt when you couldn’t get through the maze? – Frustrated, but I was even more motivated to reach the final goal”
“I wish there were more games like this that would allow to explore and train other senses”
Ways to improve:
Hide the maze to prevent cheating;
Add background melody to instructions;
Increase level of difficulty with time;
Make the volume of the sound that corresponds to the right direction louder than other;
Credits:
The sounds were adopted from Anna Pauline Storm, who is a brilliant visually impaired artist: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SSk08WmClnbVYW2mvbOuA.
Original code was adopted from Daniel Shiffman https://codepen.io/avianvis/pen/wvWXZQv and adopted to our needs (https://github.com/CodingTrain/website/blob/main/CodingChallenges/CC_010_Maze_DFS/P5/sketch.js).
I’m eternally grateful for the help we got from several residents and Pauline Ceraulo.
Link to the sketch:
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