[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] art, money, exhibition, game, sonar, photography

[Lisa Yayla]

Man and Dog Find Their Way to Graduation With Honors
excerpt

“She deserves an honorable mention in all of this,” he said. Woweries 
shared her 4.0-grade-point-average-earning brain with Richards, even 
helping him in painting class. Richards smiled and said, “Imagine that? 
A blind man painting?” He got an A in the class.

In fact, despite his impairment, Richards did well throughout his 
college stint. His final G.P.A. will be between 3.7 and 3.9 and he 
graduated with six awards in total, including the Dean’s List. For 
Richards, graduation is only the beginning.
http://www1.cuny.edu/forum/?p=1718


article
Brown and Juanita C. Ford Gallery Exhibit: "Facial Vision: A 
Photographic Tribute to the Visually Impaired" by Suellen Hozman. 
Through Oct. 11 on the downtown campus of Wayne County Community 
College. Open Mon.-Fri., noon to 5 p.m. Detroit: 313-496-2570. www.wcccd.edu
http://www.pridesource.com/article.shtml?article=27062

article
$5 Bill to Have Splashes of Purple, Gray
excerpt
Perhaps the most striking change is a new large-size 5 printed in the 
lower right-hand corner of the backside of the bill in high-contrast 
purple ink. That feature was added to help the visually impaired.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/20/AR2007092000613.html

excertpt
The Mud-Wrestling Media Maven from MIT and Other Stories
While we are on the subject of games, there was a nice piece on CNN's 
website focused on one of the games we produced through the GAMBIT lab 
this summer. The game in question, AudiOdyssey, was designed to 
facilitate play between sighted and visually impaired players. Here's 
some of what CNN 
<http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/09/02/video.blind/> had to say 
about the game:
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/09/the_mudwrestling_media_maven_f.html
article

(CNN) -- Forget shoot-em-up addicts -- video games are reaching out to 
the rest of us.

The greatest symbol of this is the Wii console from Nintendo. Its 
innovative wireless control -- the Wiimote -- has even non-gamers 
excited as they swing it through the air to control, say, a tennis 
racket on the screen.


Wii's Wiimote may play a pivotal role in bringing the visually impaired 
into the electronic gaming fold.

But not quite everyone has been reached. One group is still largely 
ignored by video game makers: the blind.

With that in mind, a team of researchers at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT 
Game Lab in Massachusetts set out this summer to make a music-based 
video game that's designed for mainstream players and also accessible to 
the blind.

Appropriately, perhaps, they incorporated the Wiimote into the 
game-play, though it's optional.

The resulting DJ game, designed for the PC, is called AudiOdyssey. In 
it, players try to lay down different tracks in a song by swinging and 
waving the Wiimote in time with the beats. Or they can just use keyboard 
controls.

The game reminded this writer of my lack of any rhythm whatsoever. I 
used the keyboard version, where you're instructed to follow the beat by 
hitting an arrow key. Miss a beat and you get an ugly sound. Things 
sounded pretty ugly. But I did start to get a little better after 15 
minutes and was awarded occasionally by crowd cheers. It's a fun game. 
And I got a kick out of it.

So did 41-year-old Alicia Verlager. For her, though, the fun is a bit 
more significant. She's visually impaired.

"Play is one of the ways in which people build relationships," she 
notes. "It's fun to take on the challenge of a game and take turns 
encouraging and laughing at each other's sillier mistakes. That's the 
experience I am really craving in a game -- the social aspects."

Don't Miss
Special report: Digital Biz
AudiOdyssey is presently single-player only, and there's no scoring 
system. But a multiplayer online version will be released in a few 
months. Intriguingly, players in this version won't necessarily know 
whether their opponent is blind -- and it won't make a difference in the 
game.

"Ideally, they shouldn't even know that it is designed with the visually 
impaired in mind, since we want to make a 'mainstream' game," says Eitan 
Glinert, a 25-year-old grad student at GAMBIT and the lead researcher on 
AudiOdyssey, which is his thesis.

That said, "after they find out that the game is designed to be 
accessible, it increases awareness," he adds.

Though using the Wiimote isn't necessary, Glinert believes it's a more 
fun and expressive option. From a development standpoint, getting the 
Wiimote to work with a PC game (it's meant to be used only with 
Nintendo's Wii) was a considerable engineering challenge.

And players who want to use the device will have to do a little extra 
work, as well, including linking a Wiimote to a PC wirelessly via 
Bluetooth signal (instructions on how to do this are included with the 
game).

Verlager believes AudiOdyssey's use of the Wiimote makes it unique among 
accessible games. It's also, as far as she knows, the first accessible 
music game for blind players. A startup called All inPlay offers online 
games, including poker, designed to allow play between blind and sighted 
users.

For Verlager, it's important that games be mainstream and inclusive -- 
rather than "special" and for blind players.

"I really get frustrated with the way blind people are portrayed as if 
they live in isolation from the rest of the world and have no sighted 
family or friends," she says.

Media, which includes video games, "is something people share and 
participate in together, a way of building relationships and exploring 
feelings and attitudes about real life," she says.

For now, AudiOdyssey is an "early concept prototype," says Glinert. But 
"ultimately, we'd love to bring the game to consoles," he adds. "If we 
get the chance we'll definitely move quickly on that."

The current version of AudiOdyssey is available for free at the GAMBIT 
Game Lab Web site.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/09/02/video.blind/


game site http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/index.php#audiodyssey


article excerpt
The Saatchi & Saatchi 2007 Award For World Changing Ideas is open for 
entries. But only until *28th September, 2007*.
To give you an idea of what we’re looking for, here are some previous 
finalists:

A tornado early-warning system, self-adjusting spectacles, a sonar 
system that enables the visually-impaired to ‘see’ with their ears, a 
compound that can replicate the sensitivity of human skin, a new kind of 
aeroplane, a storage system for the world’s languages, viable electric 
lighting for the developing world, and near-instant buildings for 
disaster relief.
http://www.designtaxi.com/news.jsp?id=11435&monthview=0&month=9&year=2007



article excerpt
The 1998 winner of the Saatchi & Saatchi Innovation in Communication 
Award was KASPA, a groundbreaking sonar device that literally allows the 
blind to "see with sound", developed by New Zealand inventor, Leslie 
Kay, O.B.E. Ph.D. This tool, being evaluated by Guide Dogs for the 
Blind, a globally recognized organization that develops life-enhancing 
products for the visually-impaired, will be field-tested, beginning fall 
2000.
http://www.edwarddebono.com/NewsDetail.php?news_id=11&


artocle excerpt

September 2, 2007 - Sunday
PHOTOGRAPHY IS A REVELATION & LEARNING TOOL FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED STUDENTS

What would children who are blind show us about the world if they 
learned to take pictures? The question first occurred to photographer 
Tony Deifell in 1991, soon after graduating from the University of North 
Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied anthropology.

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=96134717&blogID=306202518