Accessibility and VR
Accessible – adjective
Easily approached or entered: The stadium is accessible via public transportation.
Easily obtained: accessible money.
Easy to talk to or get along with: an accessible manager.
Easy to understand or appreciate: an accessible artwork.
Designed for use by anyone regardless of physical ability: remodeled the restroom to make it accessible.
Easily swayed or influenced: accessible to flattery.
From the free dictionary
When you saw the title, my guess is your immediate thought was
“This is going to be about disability.”
Hopefully you will have read those definitions and think again! Accessibility and disability often go hand-in-hand, but I want to talk about what makes technology accessible.
Firstly, a pretty diagram:
This is a diagram I use to explain what those four terms mean. Often people confuse integration and inclusion, and think they are interchangeable, when actually they are not. Near where I live, a church has just had its front entranceway rebuilt to have a ramp on one side and steps on the other. This is an example of integration – everyone can use the main entrance, but if you have mobility problems you use the ramp, otherwise you use the stairs. An example of inclusion would be to just have a ramp so that everyone uses the same method.
So why do I feel this diagram is important?
Well, at first glance everyone immediately assumes that the aim of any technology should allow for inclusion through accessibility. This is not the case. While we should always avoid excluding people, the best option for a situation could end up being any one of the other three.
Back in 2002, I was in my final year at university. My dissertation was a game designed to allow people who were blind or partially sighted to play a Formula One racing game. The system I came up with used 3D sound to tell the player where they were in relation to the edges of the track and the racing line, while the sound the engine was making gave them an indication of speed. Other cars in front or behind them made separate noises, so it was possible to overtake and be overtaken. A voice gave information on your position, time, and lap.
I thought that I had done a good job in my approach, that it would allow both sighted and non-sighted people the chance to race against each other – it would be completely inclusive. But I was completely wrong. My program was instead a classic example of segregation. A mocked up screenshot of my game is:-
If you were sighted, why on earth would you play this when you could play a full 3D representation instead? There were other issues too. How on earth would you play it if you were deaf? The keys were spread over the keyboard, with arrows for left, right, accelerate and break, and other letters for getting the program to give you other audio updates. What if you only had one limb – how could you possibly control it?
The point is that although it helped an overlooked subset of gamers play a game they otherwise never could, it did not lead to integration. However, with a bit more planning and a lot more work, it could have been done. The audio interface could have just been one of many available to use. Each interface could have been configurable for the needs of the specific user, no matter what their disability or non-disability was. That would have been inclusion, as long as there was no extra advantage in any one interface over another.
This concept of separating out the interface from the program has long been a software design pattern we developers use – we call it Model View Controller, or MVC for short. Many words by people cleverer than me have been written about MVC, so I won’t bore you with it here. Instead, I want to throw something else into the mix. Say that a user has a processing speed problem. Their reactions aren’t very good. The issue to be solved here would be one of slowing down the program to help them play the game at a comfortable pace for them. Changing the speed would lead to a system of integration rather than inclusion – you cannot live-race two people against each other when they are playing at different speeds, but it would be fairer, and give everyone an equal chance at participation.
This is where accessibility quite often comes in on modern computer systems. Hard-baked into the operating system will be a set of different tools you can configure to help you, as an individual, make the most out of your computer in a way that suits you. I have a work colleague who is registered blind but can use their iPhone and iPad to do anything they need to do in their job – mark work, respond to text messages and emails, surf the Internet, read eBooks. They have to do things in a different way to me, and they are slower in their workflows, but they get to the same end goal.
Virtual Reality currently has many barriers to accessibility, in all the definitions, and for us in this industry to make it a success, we must all work together to try and overcome them. Let me draw your attention back to my original image. Better yet, rather than you scroll up the page and lose your place, let me just show it to you again:-
Originally I asked what you noticed about all the people in these pictures. You read the title “accessibility” so may have thought:
“They are all able bodied – he’s going to make a point about disability not being represented.”
While it is true they are all able bodied, I’m afraid I have played with your prejudgements. If you look hard at the images, you will notice they are using different headsets. They are using different interfaces. They are in different types of situations – bedrooms, living rooms and offices. They are enjoying different experiences. They are all accessing different things for different reasons. That is true accessibility – finding a setup that works for you and your environment.
Still with me? Wow, even when I ramble on you still want to get to the end? I’m sure by now you are all feeling sorry for my students I teach, because yes I go off on tangents like this in class all the time too….
Let’s go back to our definitions and see how these apply to VR, and what problems need solving. I don’t have all the answers, obviously, but the first stage in finding solutions is to identify where the issues are.
Easily approached or entered
At first glance, you may think that VR in its current form actually meets this definition. VR is generally quite straight forward to access from this point of view – fire up the program you want to run, put the headset on, and you are away. However there are some barriers still. Firstly, each different system has a slightly different way of working. The Rift has Oculus home as the initial opening experience for you to select where you want to go, whereas the Vive you need Steam VR for, which looks more like a standard window from a computer that you can see floating in front of you. With Cardboard, you generally just select the app you want to use before you put the phone in the holder, so there is still a learning curve between each.
There can be a fear factor in actually using the equipment. I have seen students not actually want to put the visor on because they are worried about how it will feel, or how cut off they will actually be from the world around them. There are also issues around the adjustments that need to be made to the equipment for the individual using it, especially with headsets. Some peoples heads just aren’t the right shape for a headset, and something as simple as a pair of glasses can get in the way of the experience. This isn’t something that you generally have to worry about with a monitor, keyboard and mouse! Headset comfort factor is another issue going forward – it sounds as though google has managed to develop a fantastic ahead set in their daydream / pixel phone combination, and the rift is certainly more comfortable than the vive, but the perfect lightweight headset probably won’t be possible until the hardware improves.
Easily obtained
You could say that this type of accessibility is available with VR – every other shop down a high street (ignoring the empty ones) has a cheap headset in the shop window for between £5-£25 to put your phone into. The problem is these don’t give anything like the impact that ‘proper’ headsets have. For proper accessibility, we need to get high end headsets out there for everyone to use.
There are people who think that the now-pretty-dead concept of the arcade will come back like a zombie to accommodate VR. What we have now though in many towns and cities is the concept of the “puzzle room”, and many of these types of establishments are starting to capitalise on the vr explosion. One of the first in the UK was Tension VR, a company that has 4 Vive’s set up in four separate rooms in Lincoln.
Note that their website makes note of the fact that the experience is very different to what a user would get with a phone based setup. These environments are springing up all over the country, and are a great solution if there is one near you. Another company with a different take on obtainability is Colossal Squid, who have a VR Portal minibus set up with Vive and Oculus devices that they can take to you!
Between these two types of companies, attainability of good quality VR is only hopefully going to improve over 2017. There is also another type of setup that currently isn’t available but is set to open in Utah this year is The Void — Which from the promo’s on their website moves virtual reality into the real world, and is as close to the holodeck as we can currently manage! However, with just one of these in the world, you can’t really say that VR of that type is going to be easily obtained, nor is it something that will ever be able to be replicated in our homes. They are however trying to keep it affordable!
Easy to talk to or get along with
There are two major issues here. Firstly, let’s talk cross platform. If I want to build a VR experience for the Vive, I can do so in Unity or the Unreal Engine 4 really quite quickly and easily. I can do the same for the Oculus or Gear VR. But firstly there are more than just these three platforms, and you have to do a lot of work to convert your code across between each platform. There is also no easy way to allow for multiplayer access between different platforms.
The other “Elephant in the room” will immediately be apparent to anyone that has a VR set up at home. The idea of VR is to be as immersive as possible, which means “letting go” of the real world for awhile. But this also therefore means that you cannot really be communicated with by people in the same house or room as you. You could of course forego the headphones, and set up a screen to make it a bit more sociable, as they do in some of these VR centres springing up, but I think it would be really handy for someone to be able to “Skype” or “Facetime” equivalent you can access perhaps by a voice command, which opens a virtual screen up that the VR-centred person can then talk to you through — a bit like the virtual screen on the Vive, if you have tried that! Then when you are surrounded in a sewer by Zombies, your wife can call you by coming into the room and saying “Vive, Start Virtual Telephone” instead of tapping you on the shoulder….!
Easy to understand or appreciate
Is it easier to understand how to control something in VR than with a traditional keyboard, mouse or gaming device? A lot of people have found games on VR as more intuitive to use, but there are still a decent number of analogue controls and sets of buttons on even the hand-based controllers we now see on the Rift and Vive. For a lot of gamers, who are used to more traditional controls, being able to grab things, open things, move things etc as you would in real life is actually a steep learning curve, because they are so used to standard controllers. Non-gamers seem to take to these new style systems with ease though.
While it is safe to say (and I already have done) appreciation for VR is greater when using the more expensive headsets, many people don’t actually appreciate VR technology as a whole because it’s current primary focus is gaming. Sure, it may be a great source of interactive entertainment, or even the future of video, but does that truly show the potential of what this technology has to offer? Other than people like you, who read articles in publications such as this, is the person on the street actually aware of the uses of VR in Medicine such as pain management? Construction? Town Planning? Education? It could be a tool as ubiquitous as the computer is in all sorts of businesses and settings, but the focus generally seems to be ride-on-rails shoot the zombie/robot/anything that definitely isn’t a human because of ethical issues style games.
Designed for use by anyone regardless of physical ability
A lot of work could be achieved in this area with the creation of a framework or platform that takes a lot of the work away from the individual developer, but all VR programs can sit on top of, without perhaps being specific to a particular platform too. We see these sorts of tools at OS level on normal machines, but perhaps VR is due its own “operating environment” rather than a full OS to sit on top of – Microsoft are doing work in this area with Windows Holographic, but it could easily be produced as a plugin for the different engines that are popular with VR developers by a third party.
Without producing an exhaustive list, the Areas that really need addressing here include mobility, limb deficiency, paralysis, processing speed issues, and issues around communication – catering for the deaf with subtitling systems, alternatives to voice communication for people that cannot talk properly, etc.
There would be a huge benefit to developing this framework for many other reasons as well. Remember a lot of these “features” would be utilised by able bodied depending on their environment – e.g. You can hardly stand up and look behind you while you are a passenger in a car. VR’s real future is still seen as mobile, and while you may think it strange now to see someone out and about with an HMD on their head, in the next 10 years or so it won’t be quite as much.
Easily swayed or influenced
Let’s be honest, VR could be a new fad, just like 3DTV was. Great for those that could see its benefits, but ultimately just an expensive toy. In modern social media everyone lives in a bubble of their own interests and believe the general population match their thoughts. This is why we “all” believed Brexit could never happen, and Trump would never become president. If you look at your Twitter feed, I bet many of the people listed have something to do with VR – I know that’s how mine is. It turns out that this isn’t actually normal for the general population – I know, what a shock! But it does mean that we as pioneers have a skewed view about the popularity of the concept. The computing students I teach have all experienced VR through me firsthand, and although most are gamers and tech geeks, only two out of nearly 30 of them see VR as being “the next big thing”. Most see it as a niche at best. To put this in context, out of these 30, 8 have a 3DTV. But they have all played Pokemon Go, and see it as a very different proposition to VR.
So, in conclusion, accessibility in all of its forms is really what we need to focus on as an industry to start getting the buy-in from the general public. Show them the positives the technology could make to their lives! Every new technology only has a short lead time to prove their worth, before it becomes yesterday’s news and we have to wait another 5–10 years for the next resurgence. We can, as a community, show what value we have with VR, and do our best to show why it should be the next big computing platform for the next ten years. We just need to make sure we learn from the 3DTV and Google Glass style projects that have come before us.
