Sense of Blindness: A Fully Non-Visual VR Experience to Foster Empathy Toward Urban Blindness

In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a powerful medium for simulating complex human experiences and promoting empathy through immersive learning. This paper presents Sense of Blindness, a VR-based serious game designed to raise awareness about the everyday challenges faced by blind individuals in urban environments. Unlike traditional empathy-oriented experiences, our system deliberately removes all visual input during gameplay, relying exclusively on spatial audio and haptic feedback to simulate non-visual navigation. The user interacts with the environment through a virtual white cane, receiving directional and obstacle-related cues via audio and controller vibrations. The game unfolds within a realistic urban setting inspired by an Italian pedestrian street and includes a structured sequence of obstacles, crosswalks, and auditory landmarks. The design prioritizes accessibility and user experience, providing visual and auditory menu systems and a progressive audio-based tutorial. A preliminary evaluation involving 38 sighted participants was conducted using Gameful Experience Gamification (Gamex). The results indicate a significant increase in user-reported empathy, awareness of visual impairment, and engagement. Participants particularly appreciated the immersive quality of spatial audio, which was rated as the most impactful sensory component. The study contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by exploring the design space of fully non-visual VR experiences and by demonstrating the potential of sensory-only interaction models to foster inclusion and reflection. Future developments include expanding the scenario catalog, longitudinal impact analysis, and application in educational and public contexts.