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Quake For the Blind

Posted by timothy on 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."

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Whats next? by Quixote · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  2. Prior art ?!?! by daoine · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  3. Colour problems. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.