Mount Earverest
AUDIBENE
Think of it as
a game.
Funny thing—in computer games, we happily do a lot of stuff we wouldn’t want to do in our daily lives. Fighting demons, for example. Crawling (and jumping and running) through humongous underground sewer systems—and fighting Bowser. Or, God forbid, being a tram driver.
For teenagers, all this is nearly as unpleasant as enduring a hearing test. That’s why we turned the three most common hearing tests into a computer game.
Usually, hearing doesn’t have the most important role in gameplay. For our game, it is essential. If you don’t hear well, you can’t succeed. So by creating an intentionally inaccessible game, we could check if the key abilities of auditory perception— directional hearing, auditory speech processing and frequency resolution—are OK.
Built with the help of audiometrists and sound designers, our test was so good that it could even help with an initial diagnosis. And the best part: the game is actually fun.
