10 Months ago, my brother and I were in a car accident that left him minimally functional. While we were in the hospital, we met a girl who was also crippled in a car accident. She now controls her wheel chair with a device that has a single joystick on it, which se adjusts by pushing it with her lower lip and chin. She has another device that operates in the same way, but has two joysticks on it, and which plugs into the computer through a USB port. What I was wondering is if it was possible to design an program that would interface between that second device and an xbox 360? From there, it would be easy (relatively) to design programs that would enable her to function in much the same way as we do with a computer. She's also 7 or 8 so it would also serve as an entertainment outlet for her.
I realize this is way outside my ability, but it's just a thought,
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Peter
Gaming for the Disabled
With a X360?
The SW will probably be unusable anyway, but even if you end up using XNA to do the programming, it is just easier to use a PC... hopefully it will just enumerate as an HID device (even wiimotes do - although they are quite limited - so there's chance).
Have a look at the PC she's using now. But there's a problem: somebody will have to plug the device somehow. In general those kind of solutions need to start from her disability and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
In the past I played a bit with IR illuminators and eye detection, admittedly without much success. If you don't have at least a few good fingers to trust, then you're going to need figure out what your input looks like before thinking what you can do with it. Try to figure out what she can do, in the past I had an idea for lips only but I never put it into practice because of some key issues associated.
The SW will probably be unusable anyway, but even if you end up using XNA to do the programming, it is just easier to use a PC... hopefully it will just enumerate as an HID device (even wiimotes do - although they are quite limited - so there's chance).
Have a look at the PC she's using now. But there's a problem: somebody will have to plug the device somehow. In general those kind of solutions need to start from her disability and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
In the past I played a bit with IR illuminators and eye detection, admittedly without much success. If you don't have at least a few good fingers to trust, then you're going to need figure out what your input looks like before thinking what you can do with it. Try to figure out what she can do, in the past I had an idea for lips only but I never put it into practice because of some key issues associated.
What you want to do is possible, although as Krohm says you would probably find it much more achievable to create something for PC than for an XBox 360.
For interfacing with the XBox -- how sophisticated is the input device itself? If you can program for the actual input device then you could have it essentially mimic (a subset of) the input from a regular XBox controller, allowing basic control over the device. From there you could create some games that are playable using these minimal controls using C# and XNA, and essentially making sure you stick to only using the couple of buttons available as inputs -- similar to some of the "1 button" games you can find. If the input device itself is not programmable you might have a harder time of it, and your best bet would probably be creating (or having created) an additional piece of hardware to interface between the input device and the XBox; again you would just mimic a couple of the buttons on a standard controller, and proceed as above.
As already mentioned, things are quite likely a lot simpler working directly with a PC, especially if there is already software set up for it; you would be looking at finding and/or creating games and software that can easily be controlled using whatever restricted number of inputs are available -- if you wanted a similar experience to using an XBox you could look at hooking the PCs output to a TV.
You can also take a look at Switch Gaming and similar sites, where you might find some products that would be directly useful to you, or barring that might get some ideas for how you could set things up yourself.
Hope some of that helps, and good luck -- I hope you're able to find some workable solutions!
For interfacing with the XBox -- how sophisticated is the input device itself? If you can program for the actual input device then you could have it essentially mimic (a subset of) the input from a regular XBox controller, allowing basic control over the device. From there you could create some games that are playable using these minimal controls using C# and XNA, and essentially making sure you stick to only using the couple of buttons available as inputs -- similar to some of the "1 button" games you can find. If the input device itself is not programmable you might have a harder time of it, and your best bet would probably be creating (or having created) an additional piece of hardware to interface between the input device and the XBox; again you would just mimic a couple of the buttons on a standard controller, and proceed as above.
As already mentioned, things are quite likely a lot simpler working directly with a PC, especially if there is already software set up for it; you would be looking at finding and/or creating games and software that can easily be controlled using whatever restricted number of inputs are available -- if you wanted a similar experience to using an XBox you could look at hooking the PCs output to a TV.
You can also take a look at Switch Gaming and similar sites, where you might find some products that would be directly useful to you, or barring that might get some ideas for how you could set things up yourself.
Hope some of that helps, and good luck -- I hope you're able to find some workable solutions!
I saw a video of someone playing counter strike with a straw type thing (Don't know what its called) so its certainly possible (for PC anyway)
Unless you can find a API that handles wheelchair input I think you are stuck with PC.
It would be the same for any other game development but with different input.
It would be the same for any other game development but with different input.
It's not actually that hard to do some of these things.
Were I to have a go I might be tempted to start with Linux as a base (because the software is much more open). There are extensions to X11 which allow you to inject keypresses/mouse moves into the system from other userspace applications.
Libusb now allows you to write USB device drivers in userspace. As long as the device produces USB and you can find what the protocol looks like, it shouldn't be too complicated to run it. Read some bytes, parse them, emit events, go round in a loop -- you could possibly even do a lot of this in a scripting language rather than needing C. You'd then be able to tweak the translations to fit the situation.
Once you've got X11 events happening, there's a whole bunch of games available -- nintendo emulators, spectrum emulators and a lot of free linux native games; including some fairly well made clones of PC games (eg; OpenTTD or Widelands). Plus there are a bunch of other tools to do things like emulate keyboard input using only mouse movement[1], so it would mean general computing applications would become accessible.
And all of this can be done without any huge investment so you can afford to try things without sinking money into it while you're learning the techniques.
It'd be a bit lashed-together to start with, but it's an entirely approachable project.
[1] Eg; http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ which is a neat tool for writing text using only a mouse.
Were I to have a go I might be tempted to start with Linux as a base (because the software is much more open). There are extensions to X11 which allow you to inject keypresses/mouse moves into the system from other userspace applications.
Libusb now allows you to write USB device drivers in userspace. As long as the device produces USB and you can find what the protocol looks like, it shouldn't be too complicated to run it. Read some bytes, parse them, emit events, go round in a loop -- you could possibly even do a lot of this in a scripting language rather than needing C. You'd then be able to tweak the translations to fit the situation.
Once you've got X11 events happening, there's a whole bunch of games available -- nintendo emulators, spectrum emulators and a lot of free linux native games; including some fairly well made clones of PC games (eg; OpenTTD or Widelands). Plus there are a bunch of other tools to do things like emulate keyboard input using only mouse movement[1], so it would mean general computing applications would become accessible.
And all of this can be done without any huge investment so you can afford to try things without sinking money into it while you're learning the techniques.
It'd be a bit lashed-together to start with, but it's an entirely approachable project.
[1] Eg; http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ which is a neat tool for writing text using only a mouse.
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