The paper “The Design Space of the Auditory Representation of Objects and Their Behaviours in Virtual Reality for Blind People”, co-authored by LASIGE’s João Guerreiro and André Rodrigues (both integrated researchers) and Rodrigo Nogueira (MSc student) has been accepted to IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2023), a top-ranked venue (CORE A*). The paper is also co-authored by Yujin Kim, SeungA Chung, and Uran Oh from Ewha Womans University, South Korea. The conference will take place in Shangai, China, from the 25th to the 29th of March.

In this paper, the authors propose a design space to explore how to augment objects and their behaviours with an audio representation in order to make virtual environments more accessible to blind people. The authors then explored this design space in the context of two VR Boxing applications in user studies with 16 blind participants, finding several engaging approaches for the audio representation of virtual objects (e.g., the opponent’s hands when attacking or defending).

The paper will also be published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, a top-ranked journal (SCIMAGO Q1, h-index=148), as it is usual for the IEEE VR papers considered to have relevant contributions to the respective research area.

The paper is available here.