[Editors] MIT: Videogaming goes audio

[Elizabeth Thomson]

For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2008
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office -- Phone: 617-258-5402  
-- Email: thomson at mit.edu

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MIT: Videogaming goes audio

  -- New game lets visually impaired share the fun

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A new computer game developed by MIT and  
Singaporean students has taken the video out of videogames, making it  
possible for visually impaired people to play the game on a level  
field with their sighted friends.

The game, called AudiOdyssey, simulates a deejay trying to build up a  
catchy tune and get people dancing. By swinging the remote-control  
device used by the Nintendo Wii, which senses motion, the player can  
set the rhythm and lay down one musical track after another,  
gradually building up a richer musical track.

Eitan Glinert, a graduate student in computer science at the  
Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab established by MIT and the Media  
Development Authority of Singapore , says that the introduction of  
that Wii controller attracted many women and older players for the  
first time to the world of videogames. “Lots of people who had never  
played video games were now playing them all the time,” he says. “I  
started to think, who's been left out? What groups are left behind  
even with all the new technology, these new systems?”

Then it hit him. “People with disabilities had been left behind. I  
began to speculate, how could you bring these people into the fold  
and have them be able to play these games?” He started by looking up  
everything that was available in terms of computer games for the  
visually impaired, and found there were already about 200 titles.

“I thought, oh well, it was a good idea. But then I noticed  
something: As a sighted player, I was unable to play any of these.”  
The games had been so specifically adapted for sound and tactile play  
that they gave the visually impaired too much of an advantage, making  
it impractical for them to play with sighted friends. “There were  
games for sighted people, games for blind people, and never the twain  
shall meet,” he says. “I thought, maybe I could build a game that  
could be played by both, equally well.”

Working as the first student in Gambit, the Singapore-MIT game lab,  
with a team of  seven other students he developed the prototype for  
AudiOdyssey in the summer of 2007, and has since been testing it with  
various groups of players. Since not everyone has access to the Wii  
controller, the game is also designed to be playable using a regular  
keyboard.

The game “is an early prototype, it's limited in the things people  
can do,” Glinert says. “But people seem to really enjoy it.”

Yeo Jing Ying, a Singapore student from the National University of  
Singapore who also worked on AudiOdyssey said, “Being a game designer  
on the team, I realize that we need to take care of both the audio  
and visual aspects of the game as we are targeting both the visually  
impaired and the mainstream audience. This is a challenge for our  
team. Since we are making an audio game, we need to make sure the  
sound is not jarring to the ears as the game is heavily audio- 
dependent. On the other hand, the visual feedback should be  
attractive and obvious enough for the mainstream audience.”

Count Alicia Verlager  among them. A recent graduate of MIT's  
Comparative Media Studies program, Verlager, who is blind, helped  
with the development of the game.

"As a media studies scholar and a blind consumer, I am very excited  
to see that Eitan and other game developers are working to make games  
more available to gamers with disabilities, especially when those  
games can be shared between players with and without disabilities,"  
says Verlager.

"The element I probably most envy about gamers is just the way they  
hang out together and share doing something fun," she says. "It's the  
social aspects of Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft that I really  
want to try myself, and so hanging out with other gamers playing  
AudiOdyssey was really fun."

AudiOdyssey is available for free download (Windows only) at  
gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/audiodyssey.php.

--END--

Written by David Chandler, MIT News Office