Abstract

Accessibility is a topic with increasing relevance nowadays. This concerns multiple scenarios in everyday life and can also be seen with developments in the technology and games industry. Due to different kinds of impairments not being uncommon among elderly people, this target group especially benefits from increased accessibility. In order to approach this issue, the Merge Multiple Display (MMD) project was started, allowing to build large playing surfaces consisting of multiple smaller devices and therefore, providing more space for displaying information and interactions with the system. In this thesis, the MMD system was taken as the foundation, which was enhanced with a positioning technique in order to allow simpler usability in the context of digital board games for the elderly as well as a new gameplay element that can even be used separately from the scope of the game design for elderly people. This feature then was utilized in combination with a tangible user interface consisting of electronic game pieces and a Bluetooth dice in the context of a digital Ludo ("Mensch ärgere dich nicht!") game, designed according to several game design guidelines established for elderly people in order to increase its usability and accessibility. Lastly, a pilot user study was performed with participants from the target group of elderly people that led to a wide range of feedback regarding the game design aspects and thereby allowed to further improve the designed application accordingly.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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