Hey all,

For the past several years, I've (very) happily used the Specialist headset from Nox Audio. It was really the perfect mix of features in my opinion -- great audio quality through headphones that fit on my ears equally well whether I was lying down or sitting up in my chair, and an excellent microphone for voice recognition applications. I actually had two pairs: one for home, and one that I kept in my office on campus.

Unfortunately, one of them finally died on me. When I went to order a replacement, I found out that they have apparently been discontinued. So, for the past few months, I've been shuttling my one working pair back and forth (which makes it way more likely something will happen to it, too). That's got me thinking it's time to find an alternative.

Short version: I need to transition to a new headset that has high quality headphones and works good for voice recognition. Any suggestions? What do you all use?
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You could also make an AutoHotkey script that turned the push-to-activate key into a toggle, if that made it easier than having to hold down a physical button the entire time you were using it.
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So, this is a really, really tricky issue for a variety of reasons. While it's obviously a great idea that we'd all love to see, it's also a really, really tricky issue that's not very practical right now.

I'm obviously not privy to the discussions that Mark & Steve have had directly with Valve, so I can't say with any certainty what Valve's actual reaction to that proposal was. I would speculate, though, that any opposition they had to it was an issue of pragmatics rather than the idea itself. I say that because Valve is, and always has been, one of the more accessibility-conscious developers in the industry -- and that's not just me saying it; in the course of my research, their name constantly comes up as who other developers say they look up to in terms of universal design and accessibility.

Instead, I think the problem with this sort of idea has to do with industry politics and standards as much as anything. That basically manifests as two primary issues.

1. There currently is no standardized metric for accessibility, partially because of how accessibility entails very different things for different types of impairments. You can't just assign a numeric value to accessibility, for example, and have that convey any useful information. Instead, it would have to be a laundry list of individual features and whether or not the game included them. That's great, but who develops the list? Who decides that it contains the "correct" set of features? Super complicated, right? Because the metric(s) don't exist right now, the onus would end up largely falling on Valve to develop (if they were the primary ones using it in a marketplace), and it's safe to assume that they would probably rather not have to take on the role of a standards body on top of everything else they do.
2. Let's say the above issue goes away -- either Valve personally steps up in this regard, or the standards magically appear from someone else. Valve would have to actively enforce them, putting pressure on individual developers to self-report what features they did or didn't include (because that's how specs work right now -- it would be tricky to have that information come in from outside). Now they're imposing a burden on developers, even if it's a totally benevolent one, by saying "here is extra work you have to do to get into our marketplace." If there is one thing you can say about a commercial content distribution platform like Steam, it's that the last thing they want to do is increase the effort barrier to entry from a developer perspective. They want it to be easy to make your game available (more so now with greenlight), so any extra work for developers means fewer potential dollars in sales for Valve.

So, totally a fantastic idea by all accounts. But at this moment, there simply isn't any existing infrastructure to support it, and Valve would have to accept a very different role than the one they have right now to deliver it.

Just my two cents...
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Hey Markus,

That looks awesome! Very nice work so far. I'm actually about to grab a Kinect for Windows sensor in the next week or so for research, so as soon as I get it, I'd be more than happy to help test out your software.
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No problem -- happy to help!
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Yeah, I would suggest either converting to a lossy image compression format or moving that particular image later in the slideshow.

Right now, if you visit the site from a device with a slow Internet connection, it initially loads with a compressed header that doesn't have that image, and then as soon as the browser downloads the image, it vertically slides in and pushes the rest of the website down, which can be irritating if you weren't expecting it & were about to click on something. Reducing the size of the image would obviously be a straightforward way to combat this. But alternately, you could change the slideshow order like I said. That way, the page would initially load with a faster image first, and then download the larger mobile arcade graphic in the background before it's actually needed.
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That's a super interesting idea!

Seems like your two biggest tech/design challenges will be:

• Determining how to automatically interpret semantic information from non-verbal audio cues
• Translating that information into visual cues that have the same salience

The latter will be time-consuming, but definitely approachable with plenty of user studies -- might even be an opportunity for some participatory design with gamers. As for the former, I'm not sure... While some stuff will probably be straightforward, such as determining directionality from surround sound cues, other stuff isn't nearly as standardized and would probably be very game-specific.
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I am REALLY psyched about this -- backed it a few days ago.

My optimism of the accuracy is somewhat tempered. Compared to all of the eye tracking systems I've had the opportunity to test out, the things they show in their demo videos seem, frankly, almost too good to be true. But even if the accuracy leaves something to be desired, that's fine, because the real significant contribution here is the technology. Bringing something that typically costs thousands of dollars down to the ~$200 level is not only going to make eye tracking far more accessible to your average user, but it's also hopefully going to spark more development interest.
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I think it's a solid idea, myself. Aside from the fact that you can never have too many accessibility reviews of a game (after all, everyone is going to be bringing in different context and reviewing based on a different set of needs), I am a fan of video reviews in general. They serve a slightly different function/audience than written reviews, so I never feel like it's redundant when I watch one for a game that's been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere.
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Ah, yes, good ol' Max. I used that back in high school when I took CG animation. Good software, but yeah, definitely not optimized for this sort of thing.

I've been using Autodesk Inventor, and it's been pretty good so far. Occasionally, the conversion from its proprietary format to STL (which the Rep2 needs) goes a little wonky and you get some artifacts, but the results have been good so far.

Yeah, I've been working on the interface for a while, as time permits. Unfortunately, that's not too often lately. I'm a PhD student (actually doing my research in the general area of game accessibility), so I mostly only get to hacking during breaks between quarters.

Basically, though, my initial prototype is just a really simple setup using an Arduino Micro. The primary limitations of it, as it stands, is that the functions associated with each port are hardcoded into the Micro's sketch. I've been trying to find a way to make it customizable somewhat, but it's been tricky to do without requiring the user to install external software.
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georgli wrote:
That would certainly be interesting to see, georgli. I would kind of be surprised if he did, just because he sells a premium version, and anyone would be able to access that extra functionality by modifying the code if he made it open source.

In the meantime, though, I don't mind starting at square one with my development. I was actually able to take this from concept to a fully-functioning prototype in a matter of hours, and it seems to be pretty stable/efficient.
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Please stand by...struggling to post with server 500-errors
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calebkraft wrote:
That's what I was trying to get at. If the above two things are true, then that certainly indicates a problem with the switch.

Of course, unfortunately, even that doesn't definitively say exactly where the failure occurred. It could be the mechanism, in which case there's really no fix. Or, it could be in the wiring or mono plug. Technically, if it was one of those things, a handy person could try to diagnose it by opening the housing and trying to connect up a new plug. But honestly, that's kind of a pain if you aren't used to that sort of thing. Your best bet at this point might just be to try to get a replacement.
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Hey Heather, welcome to the AG community! Always awesome to see new names and faces around here.
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