hi aprone. funny indeed, i'm laughing here after reading the post.
i got a web cam for christmas, so this program that you will
create to indentify stuff might be useful for me.
the color identifier program didn't worked correctly here, it managed
to say different colors when i put different object, but it wasn't good, it was
giving 80/90% of the time false positives, i checked with my mum the color of cloth
and then tested with it.
but at least you're trying.
and no one before released games fast like you're doing.
as dark mentioned in a different topic, usualy games take months or even years to be released,
i think that if we get the entire community together
to release games, you can beat everyone in time of speed to code, ideas and more, lol!
oh, this action game sounds fun! also waiting for it!

This unfortunately sounds disturbingly familiar, I hve exactly the same problem with writing materials, stories etc, witness the in frequent database updates as a perfect example.

What you need to do is start a side project which sets a variable that plays a drill sergeant's voice screaming "focus! back to work you lazy horrible idle magart!" everytime your in danger of getting destracted.

The problem would be however that while doing this, you realize getting yelled at by a sergeant is really quite unpleasant, and so begin work on a small vibrating buzer that simply gives a pleasant tickle every time you in danger of being destracted, however even when warned that you are getting destracted, your usually too busy to notice, so you retreat and grab  coffee to considder the problem.

Over coffee, you'll find yourself considdering that perhaps the answer is chemical, so designing a chemical monitor that responds to the body's levels of the neuro transmitter destractrozone and activates accordingly might be a good idea. this then leads you to the idea of designing a needle gun which automatically injects small amounts of the newly discovered drug focusin to counteract the destractment syndrome. Looking at the needle size of the gun however, you'll realize getting an injection will be quite painful, so try a different method of distribution, and start work on a heat seaking chemical spray which will form an automatic chemical cloud that is genetically encoded to it's targit an follows them around.

This matter of genetic encoding will be so fascinating, that you will wonder if you can iliminate the destraction gene altogether from the human genome. You will then begin work on nanites to go in and modify human dna. The problem will be however that centrally controlling the nanites will take a uniquely designed super computer with algorithms designed for adaptive inteligence. In working on this you will suddenly become fascinated by the problem of creating artificial inteligence and thus start work on a fully humanoid robot.

You then will wonder if perhaps the three laws of robotics are a litle too restrictive, and if having robotic slaves forced to obey human's every whim will just make people far too lazy, so considder creating the robots as being with complete free will. You'll then suddenly remember the genetic tampering and nanites, and give up on those boring, metal encased robots and decide to create cyborgs instead, cyborgs with inhuman beauty, amazing inteligence and the capacity to reason out the universe's mysteries.

Realizing though that a competing species with humanity, --- especially one which is superior in every way will just cause huge ecological desaster, you'll work on some terraforming technology to ake mars a habitable home for your creations. unfortunately though, mars just doesn't have the atmosphere t handle terraforming, nor the warmth, so you considder trying to create an artifical sun instead. Your efforts here completely fail because you just can't put together enough mass to create the necessary thermal reaction to ignite a star, and only end up creating extra brown dwarfs which, while useful for the hydrogen, gravity and other resources they provide really wouldn't help make mars habitable.

then you considder that steller engineering is far too complex a proposition anyway and go off for a nice break on the beach.

Eating an icecream you suddenly realize in a flash of light the answer! space is just plane too cold and far too much heat is lost through radiaction. If you could find a way of stopping so much heat gbeing lost, you'd be able to create a perfectly working star with only a small mass, thus make mars habitable, thus have a home for your cyborgs.

You run back to your lab and being work on altering the laws of thermo dynamics. while engaged in this, you find the workings of energy so fascinating that you decide to have to look at the entropy problem, ---- afterall, the complete heat death of the universe would really be quite a major drag, ---- albeit several thousand millenia down the line.

Finally, you manage to succeed in reversing entropy and launch your test device at the sun to see if you can make the beach a litle warmer as a final practical application of all this science.

unfortunately, you've done a bit too well. the sun not only expands to engulf the earth, wiping out the entire human race, but carries on expanding. You've completely succeeded in reversing entropy, in fact succeeded a litle too well, so that the enire milkyway is consumed by a giant hyperspacial supernova as all suns begin creating more energy than they are putting out.

This chain reaction then spreads to other galaxies, and in one gigantic explosion the entire universe burns away to absolute nothing!

And all this might have been stopped if you just stuck to your dayjob ;D.

Btw, just to actually be serious for a second (difficult as that may be), I actually stil! think the tactile control is probably the most revolutionary project you've got under considderation, and wouctually be quite sorry if it didn't get finished.

Towers of war and daytona are both incredibly interesting and different games, as will likely be the combat game, the side scroller or anything else, but it is conceivable that someone else may have programmed them at some point, ---- indeed while Daytona is war more complex and easier to execute, the gestures game was similar in concept.

the tactile display however would be entirely new, and as I've said, the current braille display offerings are waaaaaaaay too expensive even for just 40 sells of text.

not only would a tactile display device be amazing for gaming, but in so many other matters, ---- I'd have loved one for instance back when I was studdying formal logic and having to work through tree diagrams to determine various proposition's truth value (I had to use a system fof coordinates, which really wasn't too helpful).

And even earlier on when i was doing biology. Even if tactilediagrams of bodily organs wouldn't be possible, it would stil be great for molecular structures, (I really enjoyed bio chemistry), not to mention pie charts, graphs, and all the other sort of things needed for statistics in subjects like ecology.

There are so many applications for such a device it's ridiculous, everything from playing chess to reading tables on your bank statements and while nobody has ever gotten rich selling access tech, being able to produce a device which showed far more information at a fraction of the cost of the existing braille displays would be certainly good economics, ----- right now a 40 cell braille display costs the user something in the region of 1800 pounds, or about 2700 dollars, and even for the company who produce them, it costs 25 pounds (or about 37 dollars), per sell to build.

I really! think there is amazing potential in that sort of idea, ---- even more especially if you can tap in to the braille display support which already exists in screen readers like Hal, Jaws and window eyes, ----- in fact even being able to show 5 lines of 50 characters in braille (irrispective of graphics or anything else), would be an amazing step forward.

Even if the braille thing isn't possible, there's a huge amount of mileage the showing tactile line drawing which would make possible everything from tree diagrams and graphs to maze games.

I will freely confess when you first turned up on the forum I was mildly scheptical of this project being a reality (you've seen we do get people of all ages turn up with some crazy ideas), however after seeing you deliver with towersof war, the colour recognition program and daytona, I've got far more confidence that this could actually become a reality.

Therefore I really! hope work continues with this, ---- and if I can help please let me know.

cyborgs? ---- sorry couldn't resist ;D.

As I said, I think for access tech the tactile display could in fact be a pretty amazing thing.

while I see the problems of showing the tactile display, maybe you could attempt either a video with extensive audio description and comments or an audio podcast style description of the device. while this wouldn't obviously show it fully, it would at the least give a general idea about how such a thing may work especially sinse this sounds radically different to the existing technology in this area.

Current braille displays have a small plastic strip which overlays a number of blunt headed pins. Upons, six for each cell arranged in a 2x4 grid, ---- though it's not usualy possible to feal much of the pins when not active.

When activated by an instruction from a computer, very small motors underneath each pin raise the appropriate ones to produce a braille letter. This is why it's so expensive to produce, sinse each pin has it's own individual motor, and even at only 40 characters that's 960 motors.

Even though only six dots are needed for each braille cell, the extra two dots are used to show things like curser position.

I'd deffinately appreciate hereing about something which can improve on this setup, especially if the improvement is so radical, indeed my only major concern with commercial application would be getting Dolphin, ggw micro and freedom scientific to install support for the device into their program (dolphin may do so sinse they're quite a reasonable bunch, but I'm less certain of the others, especially freedom scientific), and then of course there's the question of people like game developers supporting the device as well.

Dark, what are Dolphin, ggw micro and freedom scientific?

Lol at the stuttering. 

I see what you mean about compatibility between those softwares and my device, although that wouldn't be necessary.  The software side of my device will mean you wouldn't need any of those software titles anymore.  Without any accessible software, besides the software for my device, you could sit at any windows machine and use the traditional sighted controls.  You could choose to still have a narration program, but you'd be using the computer in the same way your sighted friends do.  Basically you could feel the windows ,buttons, and text.  If a sighted person sitting next to you can see it on the screen, you can feel it on the device.

Lukas, unlike my games I haven't been able to punch this project out quickly.  Hardware development is SO much slower than software development.  Another thing that's slowing me down is that my old broken laptop is the only one that's got a parallel port.  Even though the final design will be USB, the prototype runs from the parallel port so I have to fix my broken laptop before I can even get back to work on the prototype. 

Dark I completely agree.  You'd have to zoom in to read certain things or to make out finer details, but that would be as simple as a key press.  Odds are you would be able to play most mainstream 2D games right out of the box, as you put it.  The game screen would simply be converted into 3 layers of grayscale and then sent to the device in real-time.  You wouldn't, for example, be able to distinguish between a red tank and a blue tank though.  In some games only color lets you know the difference between your own forces and those of the enemy, so some mainstream games would cause you problems like that.

Hmmm, I'm stil not certain of the print reading thing, not the least because most blind people do not read conventional print anyway, ---- I myself know some of the shapes of capital letters (mostly from watching sessamy street when I was litle)  but that is as far as it goes, thus even if the tactile print were visible, it'd probably be pretty difficult to get used to reading it, especially in say for instance a long text document, where as reading a long piece of braille would be quite natural to me. Stil, we'll have to see.

Interestingly enough on the colour issue, a lot of games now have options to be played in grey scale (rocks n diamonds certainly does even though it relies on a concept of coloured gems), so there may well be work arounds.

i do wonder how possible viewing a fast moving tactile object would be, sinse a lot of 2D games can run at quite a speed, but again, this is probably something we couldn't determine until the device is finished.

I think many programs have braille as a selectable font, though I'm sure trying to adjust it for everything that would need reading could get tedious, and there are bound to be cases where it wouldn't be possible.
Then again, this could be a way to make learning print letters easier, maybe?
(And any other character sets, for that matter. )

I've often wondered what a good method would be for distinguishing colors on a tactile display, and the best I can think of is to make it possible to filter so that you're only viewing in one or two colors. This would of course be a bit time-consuming and would require some knowledge of how colors work, but could conceivably be helpful.
Actually, it wouldn't necessarily need to filter colors entirely, but could turn either of them higher or lower. So if there was a situation where you needed to distinguish between equal shades of blue and red, you could turn down the blue enough that it appears darker than the red (but still shows up).
I can't think of a particularly practical way to handle how a user would go about adjusting such color filters. There could be a program running on the computer, or there could be sliders on the device itself, but both have drawbacks. Using a console on the computer might not be practical for a lot of situations (even if this makes mouse usage easier, it would be impractical over a full-screen application). Sliders on the device itself would take more work to develop and would probably increase the price. Some sort of top-level hotkeys (like what most screen readers do) might be best, but still strikes me as difficult to implement.

That's why I suggested looking at existing braille output methods from screen reading programs, sinse the business of interpreting generic text into braille is already done, whether it's windows controls or text in documents, web pages or whatever.

indeed, having for instance a braille table instantly readable with your device so you can track spacial relations of the numbers in rows and columns would be another major bennifit that occurs to me.

Even leaving aside the familiarity issue, I'm stil not certain how easy even tactile lettering would be to read anyway, given matters such as fonts, difference betwene capitals and lower case (remember braille has no capitals as such), and punctuation.

Again though this is probably a wait and see issue.

On the matter of colour, while I'm not exactly sure how your display works, one thought that did occur to me is something I've seen used on some tactile maps, substituting texture for colour.

You could instigate some sort of tactile factor which could be overlayed on a flat outline of an object and decreased or increased relative to the shade.

Possible alternatives could be for instance number of dots on the surface, number of bubbles, or frequency and deffinition of horizontal or vertical lines across the surface.

to explain, imagine making a collage using different sizes of buble wrap to represent colours, or different dencities of bobbled rubber matting.

obviously, this system would have it's drawbacks sinse the texture could only be applyed to tactile spots (wanted to use the word images, but it wouldn't fit), over a certain size, ----- say about two or three centimeter's square about the surface area of the very tip of a finger, sinse under this size all that could be felt would be an undistinguisheable dot.

This could however be used for instance to tell the difference betwene red, blue and green tanks, they'd just be slightly ridged, very ridged, and smooth tanks instead.

Btw, am running short of descriptive language here, ---- okay, I think Aprone's earlier point about the limitations of language has come back for revenge, ---- or whatever passes for revenge for a proposition about language ;D).