T w e n t y S i d e d
Alright, finally.
Last week I posted about Angelic Layer, an anime from the early 200o’s. I mentioned briefly that it’s become less science fiction and more science fact with time (although we’re not at all at battle dolls just yet). But mainly, I talked about how hopeful it was that the fictional company in the show was trying to make prosthetics, and only made the dolls to help pay for that endeavor.
I ended that post by admitting that I was meant to be talking about the Oculus, but got distracted with 1000 words of anime babble, oops.
I swear the two thoughts were connected somehow, and not just…’heehoo both have headsets’ Although, they do, so 1 meaningless point to me for being on-topic..
See, the thing is, the Oculus is…not in the fictional world of Angelic Layer, at all. Facebook runs it, and they have a product that could do a lot of good…if they’d only gear it in that direction.
Imagine for a moment that you’re in a slightly altered version of the fictional world of Angelic Layer. The Battle Dolls have gotten bigger, and more impressive. The days of Barbie dolls fighting are over, these dolls are now people-sized. Not androids, not robots, they have no AI. These are people-shaped tech that you can control and move around when you put on a headset. Sometimes they do work, moving around in environments people can’t usually be in. Sometimes they’re on TV, playing full sports, controlled by people in little booths; e-sports and physical sports mixing into one genre.
Now, add to that fictional world that you have no goddamned legs.
The company never made prosthetics, no one ever thought or cared to, and now you’re surrounded by technology that would greatly improve your life, and it’s being used for e-sports.
No one was morally obligated to make this into prosthetics for you, the tech is theirs, but like, jeez, right?
That’s how I feel looking at the Oculus Rift.
It’s not a totally fair comparison, admittedly. The Oculus isn’t the one thing between me and having working legs. It’s not even the one thing between me and going outside.
I got an Oculus just after Dad died. I had been bedridden almost entirely for six months, people brought me my meals in bed and I had the mental health of a neglected guinea pig. I couldn’t get outside without being in agony and risking badly hurting myself, which made the work-to-reward of doing so…really not worth it.
I got out of the house for overseeing the cleaning up of my old apartment, get paperwork filed, and go to my dad’s memorial. Not exactly spirit lifters.
So, the Oculus. It has a sitting mode, and lets you do things without leaving the house. Put on a headset and get new scenery, get to feel like you’re doing something, going somewhere. With a push of a button, I could jump, something I hadn’t been able to do in months, a year, even. I could open games and be out of that stupid bed, out of that stupid room.
Except no I couldn’t, because ‘sitting mode’ isn’t wheelchair accessible. I could screw around with one or two things in every game I picked up, but every single one required you to do something impossible from a wheelchair. Every normal motion has its handicapped player smacking the remotes into the wheels, armrests, and leg rests. You have to be able to turn and move in ways impossible from a bulky chair.
In many games, this feels very fixable. You have to be able to lean down or reach out to grab things and interact with the environment, and there are no settings for alternative motion. You can’t tell the system ‘Hey, not only am I sitting, but I can’t stop sitting. Please just give me the items I point at.’.
From a coding and design perspective, of course, it’s more complicated than that, but from a user perspective…It needs those grabby claws you can get at a dollar store.
It’s new tech in the grand scheme of things, but it’s the same sensation as the above theoretical. No one is obligated to make disability-friendly VR, no one is evil or wrong for not making it. But, like, bro, you’re telling me that the only thing between me and a near-normal VR experience is…a dinosaur head on a stick?
Footnotes:
[1] Although, they do, so 1 meaningless point to me for being on-topic.
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This was really confusing me because I hadn’t seen it and only now I realize you’re also posting stuff outside the Epilogue area. I missed a couple of things.
Hmm..I see the previous article to this one (Sci-Fi Reality) with the Epilogue tag. Where are you not seeing it?
While we’re on meta post topics:
* The new entry in the Deux Ex series is not tagged Epilogue. Maybe makes sense since it’s Shamus-authored content?
* As is tradition, I must inform you that the whole post is on the front page.
That’s because I just fixed it, my bad. Sci-Fi Reality wasn’t tagged epilogue when he commented that.
It’s a time honored tradition!
Sitting mode needs a Bionic Commando mod.
I really enjoyed that about Alyx’s gravity gloves.
No leaning or bending. Just do a sweeping, grabbing motion, and the thing you’re aiming at flies at you.
Played that game mostly seated myself (though admittedly no wheelchair) and had a blast. Really hope that idea gets copied by more VR games.
Even a sweeping motion seems unnecessary to me. A way to enhance the environment l experience sure, but not needed. Just pointing at the thing and clicking a button on the joystick seems like it should be fine. (I can’t remember which headsets have which controllers. Some wrap your hands like gloves, some are like beefed up Wiimotes. All seem like they should be more than sufficient.)
What are you proposing here exactly? Would this be an accessibility option provided by facebook or is this something you’d prefer to see game developers implement themselves? If it’s the latter, it’d usually be very possible and maybe even relatively easy to make a system that works for your specific game, but then you’re relying on every individual game developer to put in a wheelchair accessible mode which is a bit like herding cats.
If oculus does it, you could probably hack together a simple solution easily enough- just have some sort of a toggleable mode where you hit a button or a combination of buttons that will whip out your oculus hand in whatever direction it’s pointed. But how far should it whip out? The headset doesn’t necessarily know where the geometry in the game is or how objects in this game are coded or anything like that, so it can’t just drop down to the floor or the nearest wall or grab whatever object is closest. If it always extends out, say, 3 feet, then you’re going to have to do some awkward maneuvering every time to get your extended hand to line up with what you’re trying to grab.
It might also potentially introduce problems to competitive games like beat saber- maybe hitting the button just before swinging so that you add an extra 3 feet to your arc gives you massively higher scoring potential, which would potentially completely jack up the scoreboard which is a big deal to a lot of people.
Developers seem to be seeing things like Last Of Us style approach to configurable assistance options (e.g. sound and direction labels) and doing more of them.
Bay seems to asking for that, but for VR.
Honestly, that just sounds like good business sense. Consumer VR is expensive, and people for whom the experience is more transformative are more likely to pay more for it. Plus even “healthy” individuals react differently to VR, so broadening the appeal via configuration seems like a cheaper route to profits than subsidising hardware and the like.
Starting with the last thing because I want to get it out of the way. I mean, sure, it’s the same thing with in-built savestates in emulators and speedrunning. And mostly the speedrunning community just had to deal. Like, I don’t intend to belittle or deny someone their passion but at the same time let’s put things into perspective.
Leaving that aside, for the record I am neither a software or hardware developer but I think the actual limitations of sitting mode make that “hack” somewhat easier? If a game is designed for sitting there appears to be only so much moving range they’d have? Heck, VR almost by definition scales and/or limits player movement so this sounds like it could be built as an extention of those systems? It stands to reason that if the player can only move within arms reach anyway scaling that movement further in some way would be doable?
The obvious line of argumentation is the cost vs benefit (leaving the ethics of it aside), I don’t know how big those costs are but at the same time as someone whose vision gets progressively worse I can’t help but notice that there are often no accessibility options for me despite the costs seeming negligible*. Which leads me to believe their lack is more a matter of them not being industry standard and, as Moridin pointed out below, VR games are still a relatively new technology, the time to set those standards is now.
*Check out a Pathfinder:Wrath of the Righteous** dialogue screen, I have problems reading it, I don’t feel that a high contrast, say white or yellow text on black background, option would be prohibitively expensive? On that note the game already has multiple slider to adjust for colourblindness for example.
**Great game otherwise. Is there any idea of rebootin the “What have we played” series of posts so we can talk freely without derailing a topic?
Doesn’t Oculus give some SDK that all the game devs use? They should be able to provide some assistive tech in a way that the devs have less work, but can still make it work with the specific geometry they’re piping into the headset.
I would say it would be good business sense to set core functionality for sitting assumed to be a chair with sides. IE An armchair… A lazyboy… A wheelchair. It makes no sense for it to expect users to use a stool or kitchen chair. Those are not the types of chairs typical in a living room environment. Nor are they comfortable places to sit to play games.
I think Bay expects Facebook to do exactly that. I certainly do. And failing that, have a basic setting core to the Oculus that allows someone sitting in an armchair, a lazyboy, a wheelchair etc to pick that with a simple menu function. (Like “Extend arm length? Pick: 1.25x 1.50x 2.0x 3.0x” etc.) And failing *that,* have the equivalent of a reaching stick that you can always spawn in game.
None of that is an unreasonable expectation for able bodied users. Once you factor in disabled users it is dumb to program in a policy of “Stools Are The Only Valid Place To Sit!”
In all fairness, at least from the perspective of someone who doesn’t actually have a headset it seems that we’re still largely figuring out this VR-thing. Valve is trying (and even their attention is divided between VR, Proton, Steamdeck/SteamOS and whatever else on top of managing Steam), but Half-Life: Alyx is pretty much the only big budget video game purpose-built for VR.
It’s definitely a “per-developer/game” thing.
I’ve played a few “sitting mode” VR games that I’m pretty sure would work just fine in a wheelchair – at least, they work just fine in my “non-spinny office chair with armrests”, which I think is the closest I can get to that.
In fact, most of the original Rift games were like that – you could lean around a bit, but try to actually move your head more than maybe 40-50cm from centre and the tracking gave up.
My suspicion is that the issues you’re running into are primarily because “room scale is the new hotness”.
So in those games, “sitting mode” is simply a quickly hacked-in port. Much like many PC-to-console ports, they screw it up because they built the game around mechanics that don’t exist in seated mode and didn’t spend the time actually playtesting to make sure it’s playable sat in an armchair, let alone wheelchair.
On the bright side, that means better ports will come, and eventually more games will be “seated-first”.
On the dark side, it took years for that to happen with PC/console, there are still horrifically bad ports, and even now it’s incredibly difficult to figure out whether a given game is even playable on PC/console, let alone a good enough port to be fun.
I played “I Expect You To Die” on the Oculus from a chair. Not a wheelchair, mind, and I get that that’s not the same thing, but it does have the “point to get that” control. Sometimes you’re having to reach around in weird ways to point at the thing you want without bumping into the armrests, but it might be worth a look.
My wife and I play a lot of Demeo – basically a dungeon crawler boardgame, where you move pieces around a vr board – from the sofa. It has pretty good intuitive controls for dragging your camera around. And we recently played another turn-based story game with a similar kind of interface; though I can’t think of the name at the moment, I can find it if you’re interested. Both are basically boardgames, so not what a lot of people look for in a VR experience, but we enjoyed them.
Not arguing your point, by the way. Just trying to offer up a few of the best possibilities I can think of.
Table of Tales was the other one…
Sort of on topic, I would recommend a book duo-logy called ‘The Lock In Series’ by John Scalzi (2 books so far, Lock In and Head On). It takes place in the near future with the kind of technology you’ve talked about (human-ish robots that people can pilot remotely via an advanced VR interface). First book is a murder mystery, with the main character being a completely paralyzed FBI agent who primarily interacts with the world via a pilot-able robot. Scalzi is always a good read and the tech is pretty interesting, even if a murder mystery isn’t one’s cup of tea. And if you like audio books, Will Wheaton narrates it (he does a great job imo). The second book goes into sports and how the technology impacts that sector, though like the first book, brings the main character into it via a murder investigation.
Oooo. Adding to my reading list, thank you.
Just finished the first book. Excellent. Thank you for the suggestion.
Bruce Willis.
That world sounds exactly like Surrogates. A Bruce Willis movie after a graphic novel of the same name.
Wil Wheaton is one od the narrators. At least the first book exists in two narrations, one narrated by Wil Wheaton and one narrated by Amber Benson. This is (according to Scalzi) quite intentional. I am in principle happy to write more, but that could potentially be considered spoilers.
Recently, I noticed that Audible has a version narrated by Wil Wheaton (male) and another narrated by Amber Benson (female) … and very belatedly realized that the novel apparently never specifies which gender or biological sex the protagonist (named “Chris”) happens to be. (I haven’t gone back through it to make sure, but it seems like a Scalzi move, and since nearly all interactions are robot-mediated, there’s no real reason for us to know.)
[And now I’m hoping that this doesn’t constitute a spoiler …]
Nicely said.
going back to anime, there are so many things in Ghost in the Shell that make me hopeful for the future, such as fully prosthetic bodies controlled remotely
but there are more examples of how technology is misused to exploit people
I always feel crazy when looking at VR-tech’s potential and how it is actually getting used. This stuff would have so much more… *beneficial* uses. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an art-lover at heart, exploring new kinds of art with this makes m e happy, but damn is it a sign of society’s boneheaded structuring of economic incentives that we focus on making videogames with this tech first instead of relief for dementia patients or VR therapy assistance etc.