Multi-Sensory Color Expression with Sound and Temperature in Visual Arts Appreciation for People with Visual Impairment

Abstract

For years the HCI community’s research has been focused on the hearing and sight senses. However, in recent times, there has been an increased interest in using other types of senses, such as smell or touch. Moreover, this has been accompanied with growing research related to sensory substitution techniques and multi-sensory systems. Similarly, contemporary art has also been influenced by this trend and the number of artists interested in creating novel multi-sensory works of art has increased substantially. As a result, the opportunities for visually impaired people to experience artworks in different ways are also expanding. In spite of all this, the research focusing on multimodal systems for experiencing visual arts is not large and user tests comparing different modalities and senses, particularly in the field of art, are insufficient. This paper attempts to design a multi-sensory mapping to convey color to visually impaired people employing musical sounds and temperature cues. Through user tests and surveys with a total of 18 participants, we show that this multi-sensory system is properly designed to allow the user to distinguish and experience a total of 24 colors. The tests consist of several semantic correlational adjective-based surveys for comparing the different modalities to find out the best way to express colors through musical sounds and temperature cues based on previously well-established sound-color and temperature-color coding algorithms. In addition, the resulting final algorithm is also tested with 12 more users.