Posts with tag: blind

Web-cam CCTV

| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology

People with impaired vision often use CCTV devices to enlarge printed text. How well could we simulate this with a cheap web cam, a milk crate, a strip light, and some software?

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Alternative to Braille Embossers

| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology

Making a Braille embosser is really hard for CS types. We make software. So how can we use commodity devices and software to help children learn to read Braille? The method teachers use now is make a letter/feel a letter. The child writes by pressing the keys on the embosser and reads by feeling the result. The is comparable to sighted kids making the same letter over and over.

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Dance Dance Revolution Ideas

| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology

Current implementations of DDR specify steps the user must match exactly to score points. Someone recently introduced matching silhouettes but it is essentially the same thing. The step files are synchronized with the music using a simple offset and rate. Thus the music has to have a strictly fixed beat and (practically) has to be shipped with the game resulting in copyright issues.

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Why not Morse?

| tags: blind, deaf, enabling technology

While listening to Anindya Bhattacharyya (Bapin) at "The Magic of Technology for the Deaf-Blind Population" workshop in Raleigh today I starting thinking again about Morse code. Bapin was lamenting the high cost of Braille displays. The problem, as with most assistive technology, is low volume. You can buy a great laptop for less than $1k but a Braille display to go with it is going to cost several thousand. He told about students they train at Helen Keller National Center for the Deaf-Blind having to wait for years to get the equipment they need.

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Flight sim game ideas

| tags: blind, ideas, enabling technology

Flight simulator ideas with Shane and Matthew on 12 June 2006.

  • 2-D only for now
  • Forget cells, use coordinates instead, use a circular aperture for detection.
  • Beep sound works well for targets.
  • What sound for anti-aircraft station?
  • Probability of getting hit while over an anti-aircraft station?
  • Running out of fuel and/or bombs
  • Bomb sounds?
  • More points for hitting target than for hitting AAS .
  • Possible to hit multiple targets with same sound but perhaps one target at a time is easier
  • Have key to hear targets one at a time
  • Multiplayer version eventually
  • Announcements “you’ve been hit”, “you destoyed the base”, “you destroyed the AAS ”, “targets are too far away”
  • Warning announcement when near AAS and possibly continuous sound

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