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."

Comments

screen shot

[kirn_malinus]

what, no screen shots?

Whats next?

[wompser]

Whats next, MP3's for the deaf?

Re:Whats next?

[Quixote]

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.

Useful for everyone?

[OneStepFromElysium]

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?

[MisterBlister]

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.

Well, it's hardly surprising...

[brooks_talley]

''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

The blind

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Prior art ?!?!

[daoine]

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

Re:Not that bad I guess

[br0ck]

Perhaps the blind could use vibration feedback in the iFeel mouse to be informed of shot accuracy. Immersion has already added distinct vibrations for many events in Unreal Tournament.

GamesForTheBlind

[sh0rtie]

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.

Colour problems.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.