Space Party Rescue

Listening and hearing, especially in group settings, is challenging for anyone.
[ROLE]
Game & XR Designer, Producer
[Team]

Game & XR Design

Ai Xia

Min Kwak

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Development

Pedro Sodre

Sid Chou

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Research

Ayanna Seals

E. Sebastian L.L.M.

Chella Quint

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Art & Narrative

Mariette Papic

Min Kwak

Download on itch.io

Space Party Rescue is VR stealth game with sensorimotor interaction, where you must navigate difficult listening situations during a spaceship party, and identify alien words between the sounds of the spaceship engine, music, and party-goers.

  • Choose a group to listen in to figure out which speaker is the alien.
  • Use special powers to manipulate different sounds making it easier to understand the target.
  • Give feedback about your experience to see how hearing ability improves, enjoyment, usability, and the impacts of the interaction after repeated practice.

The game was built to assess and exercise speech intelligibility in complex environments to learn about people’s hearing ability and attempt to improve it.

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Space Party Rescue was designed and developed during the XR Brain Jam hosted by Games for Change, and won the award for best research application.

[RESEARCH BRIEF]

Cocktail parties represent the canonical example of a complex hearing scenario [1,2]. Regardless of hearing ability, we can all find difficulty in these scenarios and could benefit from improved hearing [3]. Additionally, 1 out of 5 people in the world suffer from hearing loss [4] and experience increased difficulty in these (important) situations. Some studies have shown that gamified sensorimotor interaction that includes actions that generate modifications on complex sounds can be conducive to improved hearing [5, 6].  Here, we created a space party game to assess and exercise speech intelligibility in complex environments to learn about people’s hearing ability and attempt to improve it.

[REFERENCES]

  1. Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and two ears. JASA, 25(5), 975–979
  2. McDermott, J. H. (2009). The cocktail party problem. Current Biology, 19(22), 1024–1027.
  3. Beck DL, Danhauer JL, Abrams HB, et al. Audiologic considerations for people with normal hearing sensitivity yet hearing difficulty and/or speech-in-noise problems. Hearing Review, 25(10), 28-38.
  4. WHO (2021). World report on hearing.
  5. Whitton, J. P., Hancock, K. E., Shannon, J. M., & Polley, D. B. (2017). Audiomotor Perceptual Training Enhances Speech Intelligibility in Background Noise. Current Biology, 27(21), 3237-3247.
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Panel Presentation at the XR Brain Jam Showcase and Demo at Games for Change 2023