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Quake For the Blind
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."
what, no screen shots?
All circuits busy.
Whats next, MP3's for the deaf?
.....
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.
Now if someone will just make Quke for the stupid I will be set!
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having Excel (or StarCalc) on your screen and only headfones on you you can Quake without distracting your boss! :)
I thought Quake was only for the hopelessly spazzy?
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. ;-)
Karma whorin' since 1999
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
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?
And then bitched about the instability of the game on irc.
Don't read this!
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.
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.
Other than the fact that their text-reader would sound like the Micromachine Man on speed.
But this would be great for conventions. Save space and power with headless fps terminals. Plus it would be harder for those of us with sight. Possibly more fun too. No more people breathing over your should if you're good.
Not to mention I can stop buying the latest GeForce and start buying the latest SoundBlaster.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
Xaotik Designs
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?
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
a cheat for Quake taht will let you hear through walls and move without making a sound.
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
how long until theres a decent tutorial up on how to OC your sound card.
I want 2D games back.
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.
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.
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:
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 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...
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
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.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
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
My wife is blind and uses the computer to facilitate a vast amount of her daily communication. In the DOS days, this was fairly simple. As someone who has been dealing with increasingly visual computer systems (windows for the blind is a pain, but unavoidable at this point) seeing _any_ new research into ways to make computing more friendly to the visually impared is a good thing. Taking on something as difficult as quake will be a Good Thing(tm) in the long run as the stuff they learn will make mane other takes worlds easier.
jello.
aka aron.
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.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
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. 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!! :)
I stole this Sig
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.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
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.This guy 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 [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.
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.
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
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....
...how visual our world is becoming, possibly leaving the visually-disabled behind...
Saying something like:
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?
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Zform Poker is far from the first accessible game. Other games include Shades of Doom, 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, 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.
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.
...why do drive-up ATMs have brail on the buttons?
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Finally some players I can frag!
all kidding aside, it seems like there are other games more suited to alternative display technologies.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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?
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/dreamcast/data/251 16.html
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Freedom: "I won't!"
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 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 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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