PhET Energy Skate Park - Competitive Analysis

Owned by Jonathan Hung
Sept 06, 2017
2 min read

Existing non-visual wayfinding

  • Most wayfinding / navigation applications for non-visual users describes location relative to the user.
  • Examples: BlindSquare (Youtube video), and Sendero Seeing Eye GPS (Youtube video).
  • BlindSquare has a feature which lets a user discover surroundings by panning the phone around.
  • During navigation SeeingEye would use audio cues and narration to give updates and alerts (i.e. a description and a turn signal sound indicates which direction to turn).

Handisco smart white cane:

  • Video on PBS about Handisco.
  • Uses vibration and sound (like a Geiger counter) to convey proximity. Uses narration to give prompts and alerts.

SmartCane:

  • Smartcane video on YouTube
  • Uses vibration exclusively to convey proximity to objects as to not compete with auditory information from the environment.

Model Based Sonification

  • Chapter 16 in the Sonification Handbook has some interesting videos.
    • Example S16.3: Tangible Data Scanning - similar to using the skater and dragging it around to scan the scene
    • Example S16.4: Principal Curve Sonification of a noisy spiral data set - convey shape of a dataset (i.e. the track)
    • Example S16.6: Particle Trajectory Sonification for 1 particle - conveying motion of a particle (i.e. skater). Note the difference in the quality of sound with different masses
  • Chapter 17 in the Sonification Handbook
    • Using k-sonar to depict shape of objects (example S17.5 to S17.11)
    • Example S17.15: Smartsight square - conveying a square shape
  • Chapter 20 in the Sonification Handbook
    • Example S20.2: SWAN video VR demo - user navigating a physical space using sonar "pings" and earcons to confirm selections

K-Sonar

Audio games