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Games Entertainment

Quake For the Blind 226

Posted by timothy from the really-fast-braille dept.
Kirby-meister writes: "An interesting article on The Boston Globe talks of a company, ZForm, which has modified Quake for the visually-impaired. The article also goes into an interesting discussion on how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind the technological advances."
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Quake For the Blind More

Quake For the Blind

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  • Is quake for the hopelessly spazzy!

    ;-)

  • screen shot (Score:5, Funny)

    by kirn_malinus ( 159763 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @01:53PM (#3843788) Homepage
    what, no screen shots?

  • Whats next? (Score:4, Funny)

    by wompser ( 165008 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @01:54PM (#3843795)
    Whats next, MP3's for the deaf?

    • Is quite intresting. They tend to crank the volume to allow for them to feel the vibrations of each note. Of course, lyrics are a whole different story. Usually it helps to have the words on a screen. ;-)

    • Re:Whats next? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:25PM (#3844062) Homepage Journal
      Joking aside, it is possible for the deaf to listen to music. For example, Edison used to bite into the phonograph [nps.gov] to hear it, since he was mostly deaf in the later years.

      • Joking aside, it is possible for the deaf to listen to music. For example, Edison used to bite into the phonograph to hear it, since he was mostly deaf in the later years.

        Gives all new meaning to the phrase, "This song bites". Guess he just had odd music tastes.
      • That can work if you're deaf due to ear damage, but not if there's a problem with your auditory nerve or the hearing parts of the brain.
    • actually my fiance is 90% deaf, but she can still enjoy music, albeit very loud music, but thats the way i listen to it as well...

      and she can actually tell by the vibrations when i play guitar what style i'm playing, and if on a certain day if i suck or am playing well...

    • Re:Whats next? (Score:3, Funny)

      by nizo ( 81281 )
      Actually they have been able to emulate listening to country music fairly well for the hearing and humor impaired. You take the subjects tongue, stretch it across a dusty two-by-four, and nail it down with 6 nails. While the subject attempts to pull their tongue off of the two-by-four, sandblast the rest of their body, and then cover them in salt. Sadly the FDA has not approved this procedure (yet).
    • the only deaf compliant mp3 out so far is John Cage's 4'33"
  • I wonder if they threw any 'impulse 255' tricks in there to give a slight advantage. I couldn't imagine how difficult that would be to play without any visual input.
  • There are braile readers for blind to read ASCII chars off the screen, right? Well, just plug that reader into text-mode quake, and Blammo. They're playing quake.

    Now, my question. How are they gonna aim? They're going to NEED some type of aim-bot script. You KNOW how players feel about those...

  • Useful for everyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OneStepFromElysium ( 549625 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @01:56PM (#3843825) Homepage
    The modifications described in the article would prove useful for NON-vision impaired players. More audio clues means more overall clues as to where things are at and what is happening in the game.

    I see competitive players using Quake mods that provide this functionality in addition to normal visual and audio assistance.

    • Re:Useful for everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MisterBlister ( 539957 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:00PM (#3843860) Homepage
      True, true. One of the funniest things about the 'hardcore' FPS players is that they tend to set their video options such that even newly released games look uglier than Quake1. When you use low quality textures, small bit-depths, simple vertex lighting, etc there winds up being less 'noise' to filter out making it much to both spot your enemies and aim at them.
      • When you use low quality textures, small bit-depths, simple vertex lighting, etc there winds up being less 'noise' to filter out making it much to both spot your enemies and aim at them.

        Hm, maybe that's why I'm so terrible. Or at least, that gives me an excuse to whine to myself when I get fragged.
      • Yeah, It is very easy to hit somebody's head when it is a large square pixel instead of a nice anti-aliased, rounded head, with facial features. I noticed a drop in my abilities at UT when I went from my 466 Celeron laptop + 8 meg video card to a 1333 athlon + 64 mb geforce 2.
      • I still play the original and now open source Quake [sourceforge.net], and you can do the same with regards to lowering the settings. There are settings to turn off textures, weapon models, lights, etc... you can make Quake look uglier than all of the other Quakes, but you can't make the other Quakes play as good as the original Quake. When it comes to fast and furious deathmatch, the original Quake is still king!
    • a cheat for Quake taht will let you hear through walls and move without making a sound.
  • Now if someone will just make Quke for the stupid I will be set!

  • A good thing for office worker... (Score:3, Funny)

    by WetCat ( 558132 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @01:57PM (#3843830)
    having Excel (or StarCalc) on your screen and only headfones on you you can Quake without distracting your boss! :)

  • At work, too? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So does this mean that I could be sitting at my desk with {insert religiously-favored-editor-of-choice here} and an audio player onscreen, apparently looking at a couple hundred lines of code and listening to music, but actually playing Quake?

    Now that's a product with potential!

    (Posting AC because, well, I'm at work)

  • Well, it's hardly surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brooks_talley ( 86840 ) <brooks AT frnk DOT com> on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:00PM (#3843863) Journal
    ''Over the last five years,'' Chong said, ''we have become increasingly concerned that the rising use of digital media will leave out the blind.''

    Well, what about the industrial revolution? My guess is that the rise of heavy machinery and high speed transportation probably made it more difficult for the blind.

    My theory (though it's hardly original) is that the digital world is on course to mimic the real world in as many ways as possible. One day, having a poor sense of smell could be a serious liability in FPS games.

    I certainly have sympathy for the blind -- I'm color blind myself, and routinely get myself killed in FPS and other games where "good" things are green and "bad" things are red, but both colors have the same saturation and luminosity as bad things.

    I commend those doing what they can to make the digital world more inclusive, but the fact of the matter is that, in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time.

    Cheers
    -b

    • Now that you mention it, the IFF reticle on many FPS games is red/green with no way to switch.

    • Colour problems. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:59PM (#3844332)
      I certainly have sympathy for the blind -- I'm color blind myself, and routinely get myself killed in FPS and other games where "good" things are green and "bad" things are red, but both colors have the same saturation and luminosity as bad things.

      If your graphics card software gives you separate gamma-correction control over each colour component, you could tweak it so that one was much darker than the other, and stop accidentally TKing :).

      All current graphics cards can do this easily (the 8-bit palette table is used as the gamma table in higher modes), but whether you can get at it is another matter.

    • I disagree that "in realistic digital environments, those with sensory limitations are going to have an increasingly hard time." You'll have a harder time excelling in games that require split-second decisions after processing audio and visual (and maybe eventually olfactory and tactile) input.

      But I think most games won't require you to have 20/20 vision, lightning-fast reflexes, perfect hearing, a keen sense of smell, and six fingers on each hand to have fun. There will probably always be games for hard-core gamers that are incredibly difficult for most of us mortals to play, but as more and more people play online games I predict they'll become less important over time.

      But in general, the richer the sensory environment, the EASIER it is for everybody to interact. Especially when you throw a tera-hertz CPU into the loop. Hard of hearing? No problem, run speech recognition in real time to translate everything into text for you. Blind? That's ok, run an AI guide dog to help you find your way...

      The current crop of MMORPG's (EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, etc) could be completely accessible to blind folks reasonably easily. Personally, I think it would be pretty fun to play a blind, but powerful, wizard, who used his magic and other senses to detect and defeat his foes.

      Gavin Andresen (aka Gavin Bell)

      CTO, ZForm
      http://www.zform.com/
    • I would imagine the rise of high speed transportation made it much easier for the blind. In the same way that the rise of digital media has made it easier. Once information is digital its much easier to present it in audible or touch format.

      I think that the whole argument is backwards to be honest.

      Phil

  • Tactile Quake (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I used to have a blind roommate, and he used something called the "Braille Light", which had a tactile braille interface. It was essentially a laptop without a monitor or standard keyboard. Instead it had a tactile output and a set of keys corresponding to braille dots. It makes me wonder, could we combine the sound effects of aurally-enhanced quake with the tactile interface of the braille light to make a faster-moving quake game for the blind?

  • The blind (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:02PM (#3843887)
    The blind have always had to deal with a world that was made for the sighted. For a very long time, the blind, if they didn't have family that wanted to take care of them, were forced to beg on the streets to continue living. Before Braille, they couldn't read. Before seeing-eye dogs, they couldn't move safely many places.

    If anything, new technologies allow the blind more freedom and ability than ever before. There's always hope that one day technology will advance enough that no one will have to be blind.

    And, I know some of this from experience. I'm still blind in one eye, but being able to have a lens implant in the other has allowed me to do things such as drive, and read without super thick glasses.
  • The world is already visual. Vision is one of the most important senses (for men).

    People with visual problems (nearsighted/nearblind/blind) are just that. People with problems.

    It is/should be everyone's interest to make things easier for them.

    BUT NOT WITH QUAKE DAMMIT.

    (ok, i foresee that if 3D computer graphics help the visualy impaired, we could adapt it for real-life 3D rendered scenes...)
  • I personally think it is a great Idea. an excelent way to build up Hand and Ear Reflexes. And impove listening skills. Plus it gives a lot better graphics. You can just close your eyes and Imagin the world. Plus I think it is fun to stress your other sences.
    It also can save electricity by turning your monitor off. And it saves on eye strain.
  • I wouldn't mind having a go at this version of Quake. It would be good practice for when I go blind from masturbating constantly.
  • They keep comming out with better and better video and sound cards, but normally, only the video cards are taken advantage of by the developers, perhaps now we will also start to see some really amazing things happening with the sound.

    As for helping the blind, I still don't see how this will help them compete with sighted(is that the word?) people on a level playing field. Unless they have aiming scripts, shooting will be harder. And if someone sneezes, or a fan kicks on, they may miss hearing an important turn. This will in noway make them some kind of cyber-DareDevil, but it is a good start.

  • I'm very happy to read this. Linux has long been the OS of choice for blind people. While the GUI is a lovely innovation for the sighted, the command line maps much easier to blind I/O.

    It's a short jump to the realization that anything that might attract blind people to computers will disproportionally favor Linux (e.g., 1 in 10 blind computer users might choose Linux versus 1 in 100 for the population as a whole). I think we'll see a subtle boom in Linux market share.

    If the big Linux corps take note of the effects of this, maybe we will start to see some real Windows-killing features. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for DVD support, but I know plenty of people holding out for printing and compatibility with mp3 players. Also, a KDE theme that doesn't make people wish they were blind would be much appreciated. Go Linux! Once again, Open Source prevails!
  • My computer is great! It can run the game at 300 SPS. You know, Sounds Per Second.
  • Isn't sound our most perceptive sense? How hard would it be to say, control a 3D sound source with a mouse, get it to match up with other "Enemy" 3D sound sources in a similar position and then fire? Is it possible to develop good hand-ear coordination?
    • I think you're right. Often in Quake, I aim and take shots in the direction I heard the sound.

      One problem with Quake is that it's rather limited visually. I don't mean in graphic detail, but in field of view. Your eyes can see roughly 180 degrees, but the game has it zoomed in at 90. I'm seriously interested in using a 3-monitor setup so I could get peripheral vision, but I'd happily try the sound enhanced version first.

      Think there'll be a mod so you can get the sound and the visuals?
  • Television channels deliver breaking news via silent tickers along the bottom of the screen. Instead of knobs to change the channel, televisions often use on-screen pop up menus, said Curtis Chong, director of technology for the National Federation of the Blind.

    ''Over the last five years,'' Chong said, ''we have become increasingly concerned that the rising use of digital media will leave out the blind.''

    You have got to be kidding me. They are unhappy at how visual tele vision is?

    Geez, what next, the "hearing imared" will complain that radio is too focused on sound?

    I'm all for making things less hard for handicaped, but this is beyond ridiculous.

    PS Anyone feeling the need to attack me with a barrage of politically correct nonsense à la "handy-capaple" should just punch temselves in the face right now, thanks.
    • Pretty funny coming from someone who is spelling 'imared'. I hope you get a dictionary for graduation.

      P.S. No "handy-'capaple'" political correctness used in this post. :p

    • Im not blind, but I am in a wheelchair, and I hate the terms "handy-capable" n crap too...I went to school, got my Computer Science degree, got a job, house, car....I dont need some lame PC term to make it seem a bit better...in my experience alot of people with physical disabilities feel like they have been dealt a bad hand...but this day an age theres so much people can do if they put their mind to it..
      While I agree some effort does need to be put in to making things equal for everyone, in real life, its not always possible, so you have to live with it, and say "Thank god im not Ginger!"
    • ...why do drive-up ATMs have brail on the buttons?
      • So blind people can lean out of the cab and get money. I used to drive a cab (before I got into the limo business), and took many blind people to ATM drive-throughs.

        - Robin
    • Setting aside the "vision" part of television for a moment, consider that broadcast news is fast becoming the standard news dissemination avenue for most items. The web is great, but unreliable. Newspapers are great, but limited in scope (in smaller communities, anyway). Television is nearly the only medium by which everybody gets the same news at the same time.

      As a result, isn't it important to keep in mind the 10 million people who can only receive part of the information shared? While a talking head goes over the weather forecast, 30 items scroll by on the bottom of the screen. Now, the proper argument is that it's hard enough for the seeing to take all that in, let alone accomodating the blind, but it really could be as easy as incorporating ticker data into a subset of the current closed captioning system. You would just need a TV that could either transfer caption data to a screen reader-type device or a TV with included speech synthesis capabilities.

      Talking head data would be covered in standard CC and ticker data in the subset. I don't know what the limitations of the current CC system are (whether or not a subset could be incorporated), but as broadcasts switch over to digital, it surely must be trivial to chunk in another data stream with the ticker data or any other extraneous data for use by readers. Well, trivial in practice. I guess it would take about 10 years to get everybody to agree on a standard.

      Heck, if DigitalConvergence can make my computer open up a web page with a signal for nothing more than advertising, we should be able to output screen text to a similar device.
  • how long until theres a decent tutorial up on how to OC your sound card.

  • It's just like normal quake... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dustman ( 34626 ) <dleary&ttlc,net> on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:11PM (#3843967)
    Quake for the blind is almost just like normal quake: The only difference is there are two new buttons, labelled "Marco" and "Polo", but I can't figure out what they're for.
  • There are two ways to look at the visually disabled being left behind because of technology. I mean...sure...they can't play the games we do...do the jobs we do and all because of how visually-centric our world is becoming because of technology and this is a bad thing.
    But...
    This is the same technology that is on the verge of all but curing blindness. It's kind of a catch 22 at this point. Blind people will probably be able to see in several years with the aid of computerized sensors so we should be able to push technology as though blind people could see now, realizing that they will benefit from all of this in a matter of years...but...if you do that...blind people who have no alternative now will actually be unable to function in any technical environment.
    Just a thought.

    • It's kind of a catch 22 at this point. Blind people will probably be able to see in several years with the aid of computerized sensors so we should be able to push technology as though blind people could see now, realizing that they will benefit from all of this in a matter of years...but...if you do that...blind people who have no alternative now will actually be unable to function in any technical environment.

      I don't really buy the theory that a more visual interface to technology is more advanced. In fact, I tend to believe the opposite. Good capable interfaces should be able without loss of functionality, of interaction through any number of presentation layers, whether they be visual, auditory, tactile, or programmatic. This allows for more versatility, automation, mobility, and human multitasking. I admit that there are some tasks that seem much easier with a visual interface. But I also believe that once we've researched other interface families as fully as we have GUIs, that this may not be the case. I think these kind of efforts will pay off a great deal for everyone, once we realize that visual interfacing is not always the best choice for a task.
  • ... I'd loose to the blind... abd now I can prove it.

  • Getting my ass kicked by a 12-year-old is bad enough. Now the blind are going to beat me?

    How to search for and download files while you sleep. [binaryboy.com]

  • "possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind the technological advances."

    everyone knows that in the future the visually-disabled will be chief engineers. [nexus1.net]

    if only scientists would hurry up with warp core development...

  • With video games so popular these days, imagine a new genre: audio games!

    Take today's LAN party for example: gamers haul around their high-powered PCs with the latest high-powered video card and bulky / hefty monitor. Given the exponentially lower bandwidth demands of audio versus video, it would be possible to constuct an audio game player with much less demanding equipment:

    • Audio game controller
    • Headphones
    • Game controller

    The future? Imagine all this built into a cell phone! Just download the game from their cell network. Additional ideas come to mind with the addition of bluetooth and/or 3G networks.

    The result? People might actually look forward to long and boring business meetings! =)

    That, and some REALLY distracted car drivers. =(

  • Well, maybe not in the plural sense of the word (maybe...), but the disturbingly new-agey folks over at Slimeworld [slimeworld.com] I know were working on building a FPS that's vision-impaired-friendly. The point of a purely transient visual medium catering to the blind eludes me, but then again I can slip on glasses to fix what's wrong with me...
  • I'd imagine that having detailed aural access to what is behind you could be a distinct advantage over just that tiny window in front of seeing players.

    Sounds like it would be fun to try.
  • The article also goes into an interesting discussion on how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind the technological advances.

    Well then, clearly we need to get cracking on better technology to deliver light perception directly into the brain, a la Geordi's visor...

    (... and I'm only half joking.)

  • Rumor has it the follow up release will be called The Matrix.

  • Prior art ?!?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by daoine ( 123140 ) <moruadh1013&yahoo,com> on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:31PM (#3844104)
    Spitzer says their game is the first of its kind

    While maybe not to the Quake extent, this has been done before.

    At CHI '99 in Pittsburgh two computer scientists from the University of Chile presented work on an acoustical version of Doom which they created for blind children. Parts of their study focused on the cognitive spatial structures that the kids created, but it was basically the same -- they created an aural-based world with different sounds for bullets, monsters, doors, etc.

    The talk was pretty interesting - it's a neat read.

    Citation for the interested:

    Interactive 3D Sound Hyperstories for Blind Children
    M. Lumberas and J Sanchez
    Proceedings of CHI 1999, Pittsburgh, PA
    ACM Press, New York, NY
    pp 318-325

    • Thanks! Unlike the majority of these TAB (for Temporarily Able-Bodied) posters here, I think this development is really neat. Then again, I think assistive technology is cool (share the wealth with as many folks as possible, and there is more than one kind of digital divide).

      For the record, I don't even play Quake; I have a motor-skills type impairment, and I get my tail waxed on a disturbingly frequent basis when I try to play video games -- they're just a little fast for me. (It took me 10 years to learn to touch-type at 60 wpm.) Still, I'm interested in the area, and the paper sounds like something that might hinge on my other areas of interest.

      Besides, we gimps have to stick together. :)
      • You pointed out something that needs to be pointed out - that able-bodiedness is largely temporary, that most likely all of us will suffer some sort of loss of ability at some point in our lives, and that making it easier to cope is ultimately in everyone's best interest.
    • There was at least one other audio-only video game that came out in 1997, Real Sound: Kaze no Regret for the Sega Saturn, but only in Japan. At least it was sold commercially. Any Japanese slashdot readers know anything about the game?

      http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/dreamcast/data/251 16.html [gamefaqs.com]

  • Interesting contrast (Score:3, Interesting)

    by epepke ( 462220 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:39PM (#3844174)

    This story provides an interesting contrast with the other story about webmasters ignoring standards and designing only for IE. The attitude there seems to be that, as long as you get 95% of all potential customers, who cares about the other 5%? Furthermore, some Slashdotters seem to agree with this attitude. I've always taken the Americans with Disabilities Act very seriously, and would probably do things to comply even if it hadn't been passed. But the question is, although Quake for the blind is a great concept, what is the real value if the vast majority of service-providers simply couldn't care less?

  • If I had to guess I'd say that he's really only used maybe less then 1% of the web. Most sites are unuseable with braile screens and voice synths. And if ever there was a case to make popup ads illegal. More often then not the browser switches to the popup ad and he gets confused where he is.

    Try it sometime - sit back and take whatever OS you use right now make it blind friendly - throw out your mouse, close your eyes and use it. Personally I think we still have a long ways to go in making an OS that is userfriendly for blind people in Windows - and especially Linux.
  • Assuming headphone usage, are today's sound cards fast and flexible enough to generate all the subtle echoes and muffles necessary to accurately recreate direction and distance through sound? Do sound cards have aural equivalents to nVidia's programmable shaders and Cg? And when will headphones get tilt sensors to eliminate the need for head turning controls in video games? Actually, how good are the tilt sensors that Microsoft uses in their controllers?
  • Hopefully many who are blind now won't be for long [cnn.com]. Either way it's nice to see technology helping to make the world more hospitable (or at least more fun) for the disabled, as technology improves it will be nice to see if we can reduce the effects of disabilities... Aww. Lets be honest. I just want my teloscopic, infared, super high detail, bionic eyes along with super hearing so I can hear monsters down hallways! C'mon is it so much to ask!! :)

  • Accessibility for the Blind (Score:3, Interesting)

    by skroz ( 7870 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:52PM (#3844278) Homepage
    I'm mostly blind myself, and I have to agree... improvements in technology are not making access easier at all. For every technology that comes out to make things more accessible, a hundred new inaccessible ones show up. The web is the best example I can think of. Back In The Day (TM), web sites were fairly accessible. High contrast enhancements, Lynx, and OS Accessibility support worked fine. But now, too many web sites use Flash, tweaked out style sheets, complex layouts, and other features that render these access tools useless.

    Games are worse... Back In The Day (TM) most games could be played without too much difficulty. Now the color schemes and tiny-text are making gaming rather difficult, too. Most game developers do not cater to this very very tiny minority (I'm not even really saying that they should... I'm just pointing out a fact.) SMAC is the only game I can think of in recent history that had specific features fot the visually impaired... a "Color Blind" palette made the game playable for the 20% of the male population that's color blind.

    Am I complaining? Not really. It's frustrating that I can't do some of the things that I want to do, but I get over it and deal. I, and most of the other blind folks that I've met, either find a workaround or find something else to do. If computers reach that point, I'll be disappointed, but I'll get over it. Though unless everyone starts coding in forth, I think I'll be OK for a while.

    Incidentally, Linux' support for people with low vision SUCKS. There are plenty of tools out there, but they all focus on the BLIND... voice synthesizer,s braille readers, etc. For people with low vision (20/200 and worse) KDE, Gnome -- pretty much all of X in general -- just suck a big fat one. Even MS windows is better, though I think the changes in XP are actually a step backwards. I haven't used a Mac in a while, but I always thought Mac support for people with low vision was far better.
    • If you're willing to put some effort in, Linux can be quite customizable for this. Almost all fonts can be enlarged, cursors can be arbitrarily enlarged, most programs can be modified to pipe text to festival, etc.

      I've tried to simply increase Windows font size for use on a high resolution monitor, and I don't believe it's *possible* with many applications and all the dialog boxes I've run across (especially annoying, since I thought that dialog boxes used dialog units precisely to allow this).
      • Of course, the font sizes are manageable in some locations. But this isn't the only component necessary for assisting people with low vision. Inversion of the image is also often important, and this rarely works with Gnome/KDE. (It doesn't always work with windows, either, but it works far more often than on any of the major X-based WMs.) There's also the matter of component scaling. Under windows and MacOS, changing the font size will also almost always proportionally scale windows, icons, dialog boxes, etc. Unfortunately, one of the areas in which this will NOT work is games. The scaling doesn't apply to most (all?) directX functions.

        As for windows... you can change the system wide font-scaling in the display->settings->advanced->general panel. This will affect just about every font system wide.

  • I'm not blind, but I'd love to try this. I'm just guessing here, but I'd imagine blind people, epsecially those blind since birth, tend to construct a mental map of their surroundings in real-life and would do the same here. It'd be very interesting to try and do the same when you're used to navigating visually.

  • GamesForTheBlind (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sh0rtie ( 455432 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @02:56PM (#3844316)

    This guy [gamesfortheblind.com] is actually a blind programmer !, not exactly Quake but big respect to him for not only creating games for the blind but programming them without being able to see his code!.

    Its good to see people are exploring other avenues of our senses why restrict these games to sighted people

    i mean why does visual gaming have such a priority over audio/tactile ?,why is it we like games without sound, yet without visual feedback is unthinkable ?

    This is a neat intro [xururu.org] [needs flash & v4 browser & Sound up] that won awards for creativness, giving you a insight into how blind people "see" the web, good example of provoking thought.
  • Aside from the staggering technical difficulties involved in creating a blanket cure for blindness, I honestly think it is the best possible solution.

    At some point, the biotechnology required to accomplish that feat will be collectively cheaper then applying ugly kludges in an attempt to adapt everyday things so that they are suitable for day to day use to the visually impaired.

    Besides, all things considered, it must really suck ass to be blind, or otherwise disabled. If I were blind, I would want more effort put toward making me see again then toward adapting things so that I could use them.

    END COMMUNICATION

  • Sweet - what's the server IP address? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @03:02PM (#3844349)
    Oh man, I gotta find me one of these servers. No more getting spanked by 11 year-olds in CounterStrike. This is my kind of competition.
  • I'm not trying to disrespect anyone, so don't get me wrong, but....

    Saying something like:
    ...how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind...
    doesn't really make much sense to me.

    Of course our world is visual. Humans have eyes. Well, most of us do anyway. The point is, most of us can see just fine, so it's no surprise that our world is overly visual.

    It just sounds to me like we're supposed to feel guilty for something, but we haven't done anything wrong. Yes, we're a visual society. If we weren't, then being visually impaired wouldn't be an impairment would it?
  • Or perhaps I should say I *heard* it demonstrated. It's a noisy game -- each item in the game makes a different sound, getting louder as you get closer. I think they also tweaked the sound each item made if it was behind you as opposed to in front of you (they played the sound backwards or something like that).

    The demonstration was at the Boston Post Mortem meeting, which is a monthly meeting of local game developers and wanna-bees. I forget exactly when; it was a few months ago. Some random points:

    They limited the maps so that the players were always on the same level. There were no stairs or jumping platforms or anything like that. They were limited by what they could "display" via the headphones. Although 3D sound API's exist, they didn't find any of them to be especially good for their game.

    The blind player could whip any sighted person who was blind folded, but he could be beaten if the sighted player took off the blindfold & watched the screen.

    Interestingly, there was a blind woman there who took the developer's challenge. I don't think she did too well since she was unfamiliar with both Quake & the sound interface.

    Braille displays were mentioned, but they don't work well for twitch games. The refresh rate is way too slow.

    Tim Keenan, the blind guy, mentioned there were other video games he liked to play. One was, I think, an old baseball game (for the Genesis?) which announced everything that was going on which enabled him to play.

    Keenan briefly demonstrated the screen reader he uses to read web pages. It's basically a text-to-speech program that works with web pages. Wow, he had it set to one of the highest speed settings and it was basically unintelligible to me. Think of an auctioneer or that "world's fastest talker" guy from the old FedEx commercials -- this program read even faster than that & Keenan could still understand it.

    The ZForm developers mentioned that while they learned a lot from the Quake prototype, they decided to make a card game since that made more business sense. The visually-impaired demographic is older (some people lose their sight later in life), and they're much more likely to play cards than Quake. Also, it's much easier to make an unambiguous aural interface for a card game than a twitch game.

  • Zform Poker is far from the first accessible game. Other games include Shades of Doom [gmagames.com], which is based loosely on the Doom series of games. Shades of Doom is the closest blind people have to a modern FPS game. Also check out Grisley Gultch, Western Extraviganza [bavisoft.com], a children's game for the blind from Bavisoft.

    The field of accessible games has actually been very dry until recently, but starting about two years ago its really started to take off.

  • Taunting is an essential part of any quakesque game! I think the hardest part of translating Quake over for the blind would be a text to speech synthesizer. Making a computer somewhat properly pronounce "Youz b3 a st00p1d n3wb1e c@mp3r!" and "@$9@jj@ D@(9" would be near impossible but if done correctly would complete proof of concept for me.
    • Please. I never read that 5|-|17 anyway. anybody who uses 5p33k that l33t isn't worth listening to anyway, even if they're trying to tell you their proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And you'll get fragged while you stand around trying to decode all their cool trash talk.

  • SCTV (Score:2)

    by British ( 51765 )
    Reminds me of an SCTV skit from yesteryear. It was Jerry Todd(played by Rick Moranis) advertising 'audiogames'. He had this remote control that when you hit a button, laser blasts would sound for their space battle game.
  • I believe a blind could learn to play tetris.
    This is because of my personal experience: when I've been playing tetris a lot, I start knowing the field without actually watching at it. And because it's possible to recognize the block by sound, as I've seen in a tetris championship finals video.

    I've always been interested of the possibility of using the computer (for chat etc) with eyes closed. Or at least since the display of my previous laptop broke :)
  • I Xnd the fact that this is a really great thing. My girlfriend has Albinisim (you know no pigment) and really can't see that well. These games like Quake don't really work out that well for her because they are low contrast games that require super fast visual reflexes. Ghost Recon is even worse because everyone is in camo and crawls/kneels along. She mainly plays slower paced games like The Sims because they aren't based on lightening fast reflexes to the eyes.

    Now she has used up her last excuse not to play quake with me... :)

  • Finally some players I can frag!

    all kidding aside, it seems like there are other games [nethack.org] more suited to alternative display technologies.
  • The article claims this is the first of its kind to enable visually impaired and sighted users to compete on a level playing field.

    Bullshit!

    Because of their text-based UI, muds (which have been around the Internet since the 70's and popular during the late 80's to mid-90's) have always provided such a gaming environment.

  • Grapically, games, 1st person shooters and others, are very advanced. I mean we're getting towards phot realism and in some cases are just about there. However, what distinguishes, for me anyway, a good game from a mind blowing one is sound. This is especially true in suspense or horror oriented games. Several of id's games use atmospheric sounds to build up suspense and a sense of drea. Then they spring the monster on you and youp jump out of your chair. A lot games just don't have correct aural cues to convey suspense or other feelings. Anyway, what I'm wondering is why not use someone who has to rely totally on aural nuance to navigate through life to develop the sonic environment of a game?

  • The article also goes into an interesting discussion on how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind the technological advances.

    I'm sorry, what about all of the recent advances in allowing the blind to see? What about how audio-based our world is, don't they have any compassion for the deaf? There are many situations in which visual cues are sparse, and audible ones are all you get; for example, in an airport, when someone is 'paged', it is done via (crappy) audio only. There are not scrolling or static message boards which carry the same messages. How on earth do you find a deaf person in a big airport, anyway? Lojack?

    • Can't speak for other airports, but the San Diego International Airport (Lindburgh Field) has a pretty nift visual paging system. All around the facility are monitors which print out in big bold letters any pages or important information being said over the loudspeaker.
  • MUDs and other text adventure games have been playable, unmodified, by any blind person with some text-to-speach software and a braile keyboard. In fact, there was a blind player on AnotherMUD [anothermud.org] a few years ago. The "blindness" spell was quite common in that game. Whenever someone managed to successfully cast the spell on your character, you would see:

    "You are blind."

    Every time this happened to the blind fellow, he would shout: "'You are blind.' Well, duh!" :)
  • Now they will be visually and Mentally [slashdot.org] impaired..

  • Zform did a demonstration of this at a gathering in cambridge this past winter. The technology in person clearly demonstrates the differences between games designed for sighted play and the potential designes created by non-sighted people.

    The most interesting thing was that the veteran non-sighted player would only rotate the character in 90 degree increments and relied heavily on linear strafing. This simplified navigation so much so that I wondered why the team hadn't removed the ability to rotate in non-fixed increments. Because of this fixed rotation pattern being more useful for the non-sighted, the game visually and logically resembles wolfenstein a lot more than it does quake. For instance, quake was capable of ramps and multiple height platforms, features that would impede non-sighted individuals. Likewise, the weapons used needed to be either melee weapons, or instant firing weapons (like the shotgun)... rocket launchers and anything involving distance and timing are right out.

    The best part was the choice of noises. Basically everything gave off some sort of stereo-panned sound clue, with volume to judge distance and rising / falling tones to judge front / back. Passageways on the sides don't give off sound until you are nearly in a position to enter them, a feature that the blind player said made everything much easier. And to be very cute, when sitting still characters emit a "quacking" sound. Nothing here is particularly revolutionary... just some very simple techniques applied to a specially designed level of quake in order to prove that it is possible.

    Overall the game looks promising. I can understand going for a web-based economic model for this system, as a quake-for-the-blind wouldn't sell many copies. However, the techniques used in the qfb are interesting, and if certain representational problems are overcome it could become quite fun.

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