Thread Subject: Re: Second Life

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From: David Poehlman
Date: Thu, Aug 02 2007 5:20 AM

Will,

This is all good, we are operating in s sphere of rather non dynamic content
though and while potentially benefitial, vr seems to fall outside the scope
of our current work. I will be interested in what comes out of next weeks
meeting.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Will Pearson" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 2:42 AM
Subject: [teitac-websoftware] Second Life


Hi,

Mike Paciello suggested that I contribute to the discussion on Second Life.

I suspect that quite a few of you already know me but for those of you who
don't I'll give a quick introduction. I'm Will Pearson, a blind guy from
the UK. I've got something of a track record in the field of accessibility:
I spent a while working as a contractor for Freedom cientific on advanced
user interface research, I now act as a consultant for another screen reader
vendor, I've worked with several big name software companies, such as
Microsoft, on making some of their products more accessible, and, more
recently, I've started to work for Mike at TPG; however, most of my time
these days is spent looking into collaboration, virtual reality, and haptics
as part of my PhD in the Computer Science department at the University of
Bristol. Whilst accessibility is not the area of my PhD, given my previous
and current work in accessibility and my research into collaboration and
virtual reality I do have an interest in making virtual environments more
accessible.

At the moment virtual environments do not exclude everyone who has a
disability. If we take Second Life as an example then there are a number of
videos on websites such as YouTube that contain interviews with disabled
users of Second Life, and particularly people who have mobility problems.
The reason why Second Life and other virtual environment systems seem to be
relatively popular amongst disabled users who can use them seems to be that
they can perform activities in virtual environment systems that they cannot
perform in the real world; so, for some at least virtual reality actually
seems to be more accessible than the real world. A second reason, although
not exclusive to virtual environments, seems to be that people who have a
disability can meet up with others who have a disability in a colocated
virtual reality system. Often, this is quite difficult to do in real life
given the relatively low numbers of people who have a disability and thus
the likely low density of people with a disability in a given geographic
region. Second Life actually contains clubs and other buildings, such as
Wheelies, that are run by people who have a disability to serve as a focal
point for disabled users of Second Life.

The benefits that virtual reality can bring to groups who have other types
of disability is also quite significant. Taking the blind as an example, as
it's a group that I have the most experience of, then several benefits come
to mind. Often people learn about objects in the world from looking at
pictures in books and watching pictures on TV. Pictures are very useful as
they avoid the ambiguity, lack of precision, memory limitations, and
cognitive workload that is often associated with natural language. Blind
people often touch physical objects to gain details of their shape, spatial
relationships to other objects, etc and this delivers the same information
as pictures do and also avoids the problems of natural language. There are
several problems with touching real world objects: quite a lot are too big
to touch them in their entirety and quite a lot are located signficant
distances away from the person who wants to investigate them. To get around
these problems models of the objects are often used in place of the real
object; however, because models are physical objects in their own right they
are difficult to share, store, transport and they can suffer damage. One
emerging technology is haptics, which is a technology that can allow someone
to touch simulated objects, and consumer orientated haptic devices are now
starting to appear on the market, such as the Novint Falcon. Combining
haptics with virtual reality would give a solution where any object could be
modelled and that model could be shared with anyone in the world. Objects
that are far away, such as the moon, could be modelled, objects that are too
small to touch, such as the double helix structure of DNA, could be scaled
up, and objects that are too big, such as the space shuttle, could be scaled
down. This could go a long way to improving the education of blind people
in certain subjects. One other possible use is in mobility training. The
information given by long canes and guide dogs can be considered to be a set
of forces. haptic devices can simulate forces, and so virtual long canes
and virtual guide dogs can be simulated. This could allow people to explore
environments that they plan to visit before they visit them, whcih is likely
to improve their confidence when they visit that environment in the real
world. Whilst not all of the information found in the real world can be
delivered through haptics or virtual reality the amount of information that
can does give it some interesting applications.

So, I think that people with disabilities can benefit from virtual reality
technology beyond the benefits that virtual reality generally offers.
Therefore, the question is not whether people should be using virtual
reality but how do we best make it accessible to those who currently cannot
access it.

Will

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