In my interactions with the visually impaired at the massage parlor, I found that most of them lost their sight early in life, resulting in a smaller proportion of sighted people in their relationships. This lack of effective communication between visually impaired and sighted people leads to many problems. One of the more unfavorable problems is that visually impaired individuals may face misunderstandings from the sighted, such as the assumption that they are always miserable and lonely.
Kun Zhang, one of my visually impaired friends, mentioned that sometimes, when being helped by sighted people, he could clearly sense a self-possessed superior attitude from them, which made him uncomfortable. We agreed that a significant reason for this is the lack of understanding of the visually impaired by the sighted. However, he views the issue from a developmental perspective. He said that he did not see the issue as very negative but rather as an objective problem that would inevitably arise in the course of social development and be resolved in the future. He believes that more initiatives will emerge to address the issue of marginalization.
I believe I can help mitigate this issue. A game is an excellent platform for cross-perceptual communication because it is entertaining and accessible, making it easier to convey serious topics, such as understanding the visually impaired, to the sighted community. As currently envisioned, the game would be an interactive narrative with a strong emphasis on visual and auditory elements. The visual content will reflect what a sighted person would see, but its shader will be tailored to the perspective of a visually impaired person. The auditory elements will have a strong sense of space and detail, similar to ASMR. This design is inspired by my observation that the hearing of the visually impaired tends to be more sensitive and three-dimensional. Kun Zhang mentioned that while eating at a restaurant, he can often hear the conversations at the table behind him. The game's narrative will tell the story of a visually impaired person, providing sighted people with a better understanding of what visually impaired individuals experience and think.
Kun Zhang mentioned his views on the project. The main points are as follows:
He is totally blind with no light perception. However, the image in front of his eyes is not total blackness but a sense of emptiness. Floating on top of the emptiness are large blurry blocks of color, usually gray or blue. The state of these color patches changes slightly, not according to external visual stimuli, but according to the internal state of the body. For example, the color patches differ when he wakes up in the morning compared to when he goes to bed. This has inspired my shader design.
After losing his vision, he gained more imagination. He added a lot of his subjective imagination to his memory storage of scenes. For instance, when he recalled a trip to Tianchi (The Pool in the Sky) in Changbai Mountain, he imagined a water area suspended in the air, as if it were a divine realm descending from the sky. Because he could not see the real lake scenery like a sighted person, he imagine its appearance according to the name of the lake. To this day, his impression of Tianchi remains like this. It reminds me of a quote I've heard before: "The glut of information robs people of their imagination in the face of blankness." I see Zhang's way of storing his memories as a recapturing of this imagination. This discovery will likely influence my environment design.
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