Games Talks: “Playing Games without Visual Feedback” by Eelke Folmer

When: Thursday 12 December 2013, 4:00pm – 5:00pm.
Where: Pavilion 4, Level 10, RMIT Design Hub (Building 100)

“Playing Games without Visual Feedback” by Eelke Folmer

With compelling, realistic video graphics constituting such a major part of the game experience, it is hard to imagine playing games without any visual feedback. Though the web and email are largely accessible to individuals with visual impairments, commercial video games are not; as they require their players to respond to visual stimuli that indicate what input to provide and when. In this talk, Eelke will discuss some of the barriers that players with visual impairments face when playing video games. He will present a number of novel audio and haptic interfaces developed by his research lab, and which can make virtual worlds (SecondLife), and exercise games (Nintendo Wii and Kinect) accessible to players that are blind. He will also present a machine learning/crowdsourcing techniques for making user generated virtual world content accessible.

Bio:
Eelke Folmer is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Nevada in Reno. His research is focused on accessibility/assistive technology, wearable computing, haptics and video games. His research is largely motivated by the belief that a disability can be turned into a driver of innovation and that solving interaction design problems for users with “extreme” abilities allows for discovering interaction solutions that could benefit anyone. Eelke’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research and Google Research. He is joining the Exertion Games Lab as a visiting professor until January. An overview of projects can be found here: eelke.com/projects
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