Applications of virtual reality for visually impaired people

This paper describes in detail the development and applications of a Virtual Reality Simulator for Visually Impaired People. It makes an auditory representation of the virtual environment, rendering the virtual world entirely through the hearing. The simulator has these main purposes: validation of auditory representation techniques, 3d sensor emulation for environment recognition and hardware integration, training of visually impaired users with these new auditory representation, and acoustic perception experiments aimed to improve the auditory rendering. The interaction with the simulator is made by a 3d tracking system to locate user's head orientation and position. This means the user interaction is as natural as possible, all performed by just "walking through" the environment, and at the same time, the user perceives the environment through acoustic information.