5 ms·

Show HN: Survival Thriller Game that uses Echolocation

41 points by szhongmin 12y ago

exDM69 12y ago
This is interesting, I must give it a try because I practice echolocation in real life. I have perfectly good eyesight but seeing some documentaries about blind people who echolocate prompted me to learn some myself. I'm not very good but I can improve my situational awereness in darkness.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Please tell more about how you learned and practice echolocation.
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    I am also interested in this.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    I saw a few videos about blind kids who echolocate [0], and got inspired by it. The videos only briefly showed how they practice, but it did show a teacher training a pupil by putting a pane of glass on either side of the head and then made him guess which side it is on. Echolocation is not some kind of magic ability, where a person without vision gains superhuman abilities to measure time between echoes. This is the way it is often portrayed in the media, though. Shaping your mouth and your lips, click with your tongue to create a directional click going to your left or right hand side. Then listen to the sound of the click (the click itself, not some magical echo 10 ms later) and try to hear differences in the color or timbre of the click. It's just like tweaking the settings of a reverb effect in an audio software. Hard surfaces like glass or concrete sound very different from soft things like humans or trees. Distant objects sound different than close ones. Scientifically, you are measuring the impulse response in frequency domain [1] (ie. spectrogram). According to the convolution theorem [2], the impulse response has all the "information" about the surroundings you can have (applies to acoustic, mechanical and electrical signals too). I sometimes practice by trying to navigate long hallways at the office and trying find my desk without the help of eyesight (I know it is n'th door to the left, and open doors are easy to tell from hard walls). Sometimes I practice outdoors just trying to recognize trees, buildings, cars or humans from their echo. Blind people often echolocate subconsciously by listening the echoes of their footsteps and surrounding noises. This was demonstrated by a echolocation teacher by playing white noise in a familiar room and seeing their new students who claim they don't echolocate get lost in their own living rooms. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9mvRRwu5Gw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9mvRRwu5Gw [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem
errantspark 12y ago
In a game where sound is the only way to see you save a lot of time on making textures. : P Looks fun.
zenbowman 12y ago
Sounds cool, downloading now. I've been working on a similar idea in my spare time, using video and sound as input. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iai72LhlcZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iai72LhlcZA Edit: Tried playing, it didn't seem to pick up input from the microphone, I had to press 'Q' constantly to fake sound. Is the mic disabled in the Mac version?
- szhongmin 12y ago
  Mac version can use microphone input. Check your Sound preferences and you need to do calibration in game.
melloclello 12y ago
Looks cool, graphics could perhaps use a little improvement? I'm imagining it would be much scarier if there was a bit of base white noise instead of a pure black background. Messes with your imagination.
ndarilek 12y ago
I'm blind and use echolocation regularly for things like biking, increased awareness of surroundings, etc. Any chance you might add some sort of audio-only interface? Off the top of my head, you could make the user's breathing noises echo off of obstacles. Breathing could echo off of walls to indicate obstruction in specific directions, for instance. Your trailer doesn't tell me much as a non-visual user, but I like the idea of the noises you make being audible to whomever is hunting you even while they tell you what's around. That seems like a nice strategic element. If you're looking for additional thoughts/design advice, I'd be happy to brainstorm further. I design audio-only games (albeit typically titles like traditional games but with audio-only interfaces) so have put lots of thought into this subject.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  I'm not blind, but that's a GREAT IDEA. I'd play it that way! It could be called bat-mode!
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Hi! You should buy a Razer Tiamat, and a computer capable of running it. It's a 7.1 surround sound headset. It's different from other surroundsound headsets in that it's truly surround sound: there are a bunch of actual tiny speakers inside each ear which physically emit sound from different directions. The experience is incredible! It's nothing like headphones with two speakers, or any of the "virtual surround sound" stuff. People think we only need two speakers because we have two ears, but it's not true at all. Two speakers work sort of okay, because everyone's used to them and our audio presently is made to work for them, but surround sound is far superior. Unfortunately it requires a desktop computer that has 5 plugins for the audio. (Front, front-left, front-right, back-left, back-right, if I remember correctly.) Also, the headset is slightly hard to configure out of the box. If you plug it in and aren't overwhelmed, don't give up hope! You have to go into the audio settings and enable stuff like bass management or loudness management or... stuff like that, I've forgotten at this point but I could look it up if needed. The positional audio is so good that I think you might be able to play some games. Unfortunately, there aren't very many games which take full advantage of surround sound, but it could be fun for a friend to play a scary game like Amnesia while you listen to it. It's admittedly very expensive for probably not too much takeaway for you though. Here's a link to a comment I wrote about the Tiamat a couple months ago when Sony announced a competing project to the Oculus Rift. They said they're shipping something with "60 virtual speakers" so that prompted my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7426463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7426463

41 points by szhongmin 12y ago

This is interesting, I must give it a try because I practice echolocation in real life. I have perfectly good eyesight but seeing some documentaries about blind people who echolocate prompted me to learn some myself. I'm not very good but I can improve my situational awereness in darkness.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Please tell more about how you learned and practice echolocation.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I am also interested in this.
- exDM69 12y ago
  I saw a few videos about blind kids who echolocate [0], and got inspired by it. The videos only briefly showed how they practice, but it did show a teacher training a pupil by putting a pane of glass on either side of the head and then made him guess which side it is on. Echolocation is not some kind of magic ability, where a person without vision gains superhuman abilities to measure time between echoes. This is the way it is often portrayed in the media, though. Shaping your mouth and your lips, click with your tongue to create a directional click going to your left or right hand side. Then listen to the sound of the click (the click itself, not some magical echo 10 ms later) and try to hear differences in the color or timbre of the click. It's just like tweaking the settings of a reverb effect in an audio software. Hard surfaces like glass or concrete sound very different from soft things like humans or trees. Distant objects sound different than close ones. Scientifically, you are measuring the impulse response in frequency domain [1] (ie. spectrogram). According to the convolution theorem [2], the impulse response has all the "information" about the surroundings you can have (applies to acoustic, mechanical and electrical signals too). I sometimes practice by trying to navigate long hallways at the office and trying find my desk without the help of eyesight (I know it is n'th door to the left, and open doors are easy to tell from hard walls). Sometimes I practice outdoors just trying to recognize trees, buildings, cars or humans from their echo. Blind people often echolocate subconsciously by listening the echoes of their footsteps and surrounding noises. This was demonstrated by a echolocation teacher by playing white noise in a familiar room and seeing their new students who claim they don't echolocate get lost in their own living rooms. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9mvRRwu5Gw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9mvRRwu5Gw [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_response [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_theorem

errantspark 12y ago

In a game where sound is the only way to see you save a lot of time on making textures. : P Looks fun.

zenbowman 12y ago

Sounds cool, downloading now. I've been working on a similar idea in my spare time, using video and sound as input. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iai72LhlcZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iai72LhlcZA Edit: Tried playing, it didn't seem to pick up input from the microphone, I had to press 'Q' constantly to fake sound. Is the mic disabled in the Mac version?

szhongmin 12y ago
Mac version can use microphone input. Check your Sound preferences and you need to do calibration in game.

melloclello 12y ago

Looks cool, graphics could perhaps use a little improvement? I'm imagining it would be much scarier if there was a bit of base white noise instead of a pure black background. Messes with your imagination.

ndarilek 12y ago

I'm blind and use echolocation regularly for things like biking, increased awareness of surroundings, etc. Any chance you might add some sort of audio-only interface? Off the top of my head, you could make the user's breathing noises echo off of obstacles. Breathing could echo off of walls to indicate obstruction in specific directions, for instance. Your trailer doesn't tell me much as a non-visual user, but I like the idea of the noises you make being audible to whomever is hunting you even while they tell you what's around. That seems like a nice strategic element. If you're looking for additional thoughts/design advice, I'd be happy to brainstorm further. I design audio-only games (albeit typically titles like traditional games but with audio-only interfaces) so have put lots of thought into this subject.

nnnnni 12y ago
I'm not blind, but that's a GREAT IDEA. I'd play it that way! It could be called bat-mode!
sillysaurus3 12y ago
Hi! You should buy a Razer Tiamat, and a computer capable of running it. It's a 7.1 surround sound headset. It's different from other surroundsound headsets in that it's truly surround sound: there are a bunch of actual tiny speakers inside each ear which physically emit sound from different directions. The experience is incredible! It's nothing like headphones with two speakers, or any of the "virtual surround sound" stuff. People think we only need two speakers because we have two ears, but it's not true at all. Two speakers work sort of okay, because everyone's used to them and our audio presently is made to work for them, but surround sound is far superior. Unfortunately it requires a desktop computer that has 5 plugins for the audio. (Front, front-left, front-right, back-left, back-right, if I remember correctly.) Also, the headset is slightly hard to configure out of the box. If you plug it in and aren't overwhelmed, don't give up hope! You have to go into the audio settings and enable stuff like bass management or loudness management or... stuff like that, I've forgotten at this point but I could look it up if needed. The positional audio is so good that I think you might be able to play some games. Unfortunately, there aren't very many games which take full advantage of surround sound, but it could be fun for a friend to play a scary game like Amnesia while you listen to it. It's admittedly very expensive for probably not too much takeaway for you though. Here's a link to a comment I wrote about the Tiamat a couple months ago when Sony announced a competing project to the Oculus Rift. They said they're shipping something with "60 virtual speakers" so that prompted my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7426463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7426463