Guitar hero type games - a potential mechanism
Hi all,
I like guitar hero type games, and the standard interface to these games with the notes coming down the screen works fine for me as I have full sight.
I was just reading a paper on "Blind Hero" - a modification to the "Frets on Fire" guitar hero-esque game engine that uses a haptic glove to provide information about the game state by vibrating each finger before the note is required. However this fails the "come as you are" test. You need to use a peripheral, and are these haptic gloves even available? (I don't think they are).
So, I have an idea - but before I get into it we need to discuss octals.
In the Linux operating system, permissions are defined in terms of User, Group and Other. A user owns the file, the group is a group of users that the user may be a member of, and 'other' is everyone else.
Each of these three groups may have different permissions, and the seperate permissions of Read, Write and Execute are assigned the octal values 1, 2 and 4. So read is 1, write is 2, and execute is 4. However, we can combine these read/write/execute values by adding them up. Here's some examples just for a single user (no groups or other mentioned).
1 - User can read the file, but they cannot write to the file or execute it.
3 - User can read and write to the file but they cannot execute it (i.e. 1 + 2)
5 - User can read and execute the file, but they cannot write to it (i.e. 1 + 4)
7 - User can read, write and execute the file (i.e. 1 + 2+ 4)
When you apply these octal values to the user/group/other settings then you get things like this:
7 5 5 - user has read/write/execute but other and group may only read and execute (not write)
5 0 0 - user has read/write access but not execute, and the group and other users cannot access the file at all
4 1 0 - user may read/write the file, group may read file only, no access to other users
Okay, back to Guitar Hero... Let's pretend there are only 3 possible notes (left/middle/right) for the sake of clarity.
If there were notes coming down the screen then a fully sighted player has to see the notes and respond to them, for example, a sighted player may have to respond to:
Left
Left+Middle
Left
Right
Left+Right
Okay, so good so far, now how about we transcode these inputs into octal? We get:
1 = Left
3 = Left+Middle
1 = Left
4 = Right
5 = Left+Right
If this information was provided, say precisely one bar before it was needed, then a non-sighted user would be able to play a guitar hero-type song without needing a glove. This would take a little bit of time to get the hang of the numbers in combination (what's 3? what's 5? what's 7) - but I think this would work, and once the values are 'locked in' it could be made seamless.
We've made the deliberate simplification to 3 channels of 'notes' we can play at the moment, so how can we expand this to four or five tracks? Easily! We just go 1/2/4 (which we already know) and add 8 and 16.
Let's redifne our inputs as "far left", "left", "middle", "right", "far right" - and we'll assign them values 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 accordingly.
17 would be "far left [1] + far right [16]"
11 would be "far left [1] + left [2] + right [8]"
10 would be "left [2] + right [8]"
etc.
So a chord sequence might go:
11,
1,
11,
1,
4.
i.e.:
far-left + far-right,
far-left,
far-left + far-right,
far-left,
middle.
Anyway, that's what I was thinking about this evening. So is the idea / concept any good? Is it worth a shot?
Thoughts welcome.
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