The arcade opened last Saturday, marking International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Krishna Teja, the co-founder of a company that works with children between Class V and Class IX to encourage design innovations worked with children from schools across India on various design workshops. For this project he got school children from the city to help create these games for the blind.
It resulted in 14 specially-designed games, which were put up at a multipurpose hall of a school, transforming it into the world’s first arcade for the blind. And as the children from Devnar School for the blind arrived, the hall filled with smiles, excitement and laughter. The arcade was also open for parents and other students, but on one condition; they had to enter the arcade blindfolded.
Among the very interesting and incredible game prototypes on display was a ‘flightcrash simulator’, which allowed the player to pilot a flight that is about to crash. The kids shook and moved the chair, feeling the different stages of flight crash, before they could stop it. Dance Woofalution, was a spin off of the popular dance game, Dance Dance Revolution, but with a twist. In this game, the commands were of animal sounds. So a ‘woof’ meant the player step forward, and a ‘meow’ was to step to the side. There was also a game from the now popular apocalyptic genre. The ‘Zombie killers’ required the kids to find different weapons placed in the room, which is also filed with ‘zombies’, who made noises as they moved.
