A preliminary study on requirements of olfactory, haptic and audio enabled application for visually impaired in edutainment

Edutainment is an entertainment designed to educate as well as inform or amuse. It has been widely accepted by teachers and learners in their learning process. Most recently, virtual edutainment has become one of the popular ways for educating the younger generation as it provides an interactive and fun way in learning new things. However, there are limitations when it comes to educate the visually impaired using virtual application as the visually impaired do not have the privilege of sight. It is very difficult to develop engaging edutainment application for those who are visually impaired because they can be easily distracted as they can only hear the sound of video or application. Hence, the usage of edutainment application is very low among visually impaired learners. Therefore, this research studies the requirements of olfactory, haptic and audio enabled 3D application for visually impaired user in a virtual edutainment environment. The preliminary study was conducted on visually impaired people by providing actual shapes of the objects. Based on the results, the main reasons of underutilizing edutainment applications are too much of visual content involved in edutainment applications as well as lack of interaction. Majority of participants agreed that audio enhanced edutainment applications will be more attractive to them if applications come together with Haptic and Olfactory functionalities.