Virtual reality (VR) can offer people with visual impairments a new way of seeing.
Visually impaired people can 'see' with this assistive technology
A new acoustic archery game is giving people with blindness the first chance to experience virtual reality technology. It’s part of a small growing number of experimental technology options for the visually impaired.
"VR is useful to [people with visual impairments] for the same reasons it's useful to everyone else," Michael Hingson, of the tech accessibility company accessiBe, told Lifewire in an email interview. "With games, it offers a broader sense of play. For other purposes, it offers the ability to see everything with something other than words or pictures. VR offers a fully immersive gateway into our world and beyond, without anyone having to leave the confines of their own computer."
Scientists from the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) recently developed an acoustic virtual reality-based archery game. The system lets users hear virtual environments instead of seeing them by translating images into sound waves.
