Collaborative music application for visually impaired people with tangible objects on table

The collaborative work of visually impaired people and sighted people on equal ground plays a significant role for visually impaired people's social advance in society. We developed a collaborative application of music composition to achieve the goal mentioned above. This application has a beautiful tangible interface that would attract the attention of both visually impaired and sighted people, and multiple functions that are likely to induce collaborative communication among users. We demonstrated the experiment with six visually impaired people and six sighted people. In the experiment, the visually impaired people could lead the collaborative work without hesitating even in front of the sighted people whom they did not know very well. Then we focused our attention on the moment in which the visually impaired were having fun, and discussed the factor of the excitement.