Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Ubisoft's accessibility project manager David Tisserand shared details on a new accessibility initiative during Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Here's what's to come in the future from the company.
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Microsoft continues to invest in the experiences of differently abled players. This particular patent details an Xbox controller equipped with a Braille display and haptic paddles that can be rearranged.
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Microsoft Reseach, in partnership with Cornell University, developed a range of techniques to make virtual reality accessible to the visually impaired.
VR is a heavily visual medium. Most VR apps and games assume the user has full visual ability. But just like in real life, some users in virtual environments are visually impaired. In the real world a range of measures are taken to accommodate such users, but in VR no effort has yet been made.
The researchers came up with 14 specific tools to tackle this problem. They are delivered as engine plugins for Unity. Of these tools, 9 do not require specific developer effort. For the remaining 5, the developer of each app needs to undertake some effort to support them.
It’s estimated that around 200 million people worldwide are visually impaired. If Microsoft plans to release these tools as engine plugins, it could make a huge difference in these user’s ability to use virtual reality. For VR to succeed as a medium it must accommodate everyone.
Magnification Lens: Mimicking the most common Windows OS visual accessibility tool, the magnification lens magnifies around half of the user’s field of view by 10x.
Bifocal Lens: Much the same as bifocal glasses in the real world, this tool adds a smaller but persistent magnification near the bottom of the user’s vision. This allows for constant spatial awareness while still enabling reading at a distance.
Brightness Lens: Some people have different brightness sensitivity, so this tool allows the user to adjust the brightness of the image all the way from 50% to 500% to make out details.
Contrast Lens: Similar to the Brightness Lens, this tool lets the user modify the contrast so that low contrast details can be made out. It is an adjustable scale from 1 to 10.
Edge Enhancement: A more sophisticated way to achieve the goal of the Contrast Lens, this tool detects visible edges based on depth and outlines them.
Peripheral Remapping: This tool is for people without peripheral vision. It uses the same edge detection technique as Edge Enhancement but shows the edges as an overlay in the center of the user’s field of view, giving them spatial awareness.
Text Augmentation: This tool automatically changes all text to white or black (whichever is most appropriate) and changes the font to Arial. The researchers claim Arial is proven to be more readable. The user can also change the text to bold or increase the size.
Text to Speech: This tool gives the user a virtual laser pointer. Whichever text they point at will be read aloud using speech synthesis technology.
Depth Measurement: For people with depth perception issues, this tool adds a ball to the end of the laser pointer, which lets them easily see the distance they are pointing to.
Object Recognition: Just like “alt text” on images on the 2D web, this tool reads aloud the description of virtual objects the user is pointing at (using speech synthesis).
Highlight: Users with vision issues may struggle to find the relevant objects in a game scene. By simply highlighting them in the same way as Edge Enhancement, this tool lets those users find the way in games.
Guideline: This tool works alongside Highlight. When the user isn’t looking at the relevant objects, Guideline draws arrows pointing towards them.
Recoloring: For users with very serious vision problems, this tool recolors the entire scene to simple colors.
Tagged with: Accessibility, microsoft, microsoft research, VR research
The post A Closer Look At What Microsoft’s SeeingVR Offers The Visually Impaired appeared first on UploadVR.
Conceptually, virtual reality headsets present a fantastic opportunity to aid users with low vision: Up-close screens with high contrast and personally calibrated lenses could enable people to see details that might be missed in the real world. But as VR software isn’t generally optimized for low-vision users, Microsoftresearchers are previewing a solution called SeeingVR, a set of tools that easily enable Unity app and game developers to add accessibility features.
The SeeingVR tools include all sorts of individual effects, ranging from brightness, contrast, and edge enhancement options to traditional magnification and window pane-like bifocal features. Developers can also highlight objects, create visual guidelines, and recolor scenes specifically to enhance them for low vision users; text can be visually augmented, turned into speech, or used to describe selected objects.
While the enhancement and selection tools will be familiar to users of other platforms’ operating system-level accessibility tools, there are a few others that are fairly unique to Microsoft or SeeingVR. One is a depth measurement tool that helps users with poor sight in one eye gauge distance; another deliberately creates more focused tunnel vision with “peripheral remapping.” There’s even a “Seeing AI” feature that attempts to deduce and describe what’s in the field of view, absent a developer description — though adding descriptions is also an option.
Most of the tools require no special recoding by Unity app developers, and can be turned on or off like filters, either alone or in combination with one another. But some do require modest app updates for proper support. Microsoft suggests that small-scale testing showed that low-vision users were able to complete tasks more quickly and accurately with their choice of activated SeeingVR tools than without them.
SeeingVR will be formally presented next month alongside a research paper at the CHI 2019 conference in Scotland. The researchers will also discuss opportunities to improve accessibility of web content for dyslexic users, particularly through web browsers’ existing “reading modes,” as well as options that make both VR and non-VR educational content accessible to users who are completely blind.
This article by Jeremy Horowitz originally appeared in VentureBeat.
Tagged with: Accessibility, SeeingVR
The post SeeingVR Is Making ‘VR Bifocals’ To Help Low-Vision Users appeared first on UploadVR.
For many players with disabilities, there is no feeling of hope when it comes to overcoming Sekiro’s difficulty. Adding accessibility options make the game playable for everyone, and without compromising the experience.
The post Forget easy mode. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice needs an equal mode appeared first on Digital Trends.
Ubisoft has been vocal about their focus on providing accessible options for as many players as possible, and The Division 2 is the latest to make its case. We spoke with them and a number of players about features and room for improvement.
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