VR and VI
I am constantly looking for better ways for me to do what I want or need to do. This means that sometimes I venture into places where a visually impaired person might not be expected to go, such as gaming or especially VR gaming.
However, I and a lot of other visually impaired people don’t do what is expected of us and we are not good at staying in our expected little boxes. Why is this? That is one of the simplest questions to answer. A significant number of people gain a visual impairment during their lifetime. Often this is something correctable using glasses or contact lenses. There are is also a wide variety of ways for our vision to be different. The eyes are amazingly complex mechanisms. Also, people are stubborn. Just try to get someone to retire from an occupation that they like to do.
Only a small number of people are visually impaired due to a birth defect, like myself. I was raised to be Independant in more than thought and so I’m going to poke at anything that I find interesting.
This includes Virtual Reality. I am not alone in the belief that VR and Augmented Reality, all grouped together into XR, Extended Reality, has great potential in not only enhancing human vision, but making certain visual modes a lot more accessible to people who have less than standard vision.
Recently, I was given the opportunity to help out by participating in the beta test of a VR game named Pocket Lands. I wanted to do this because it had been many years since I had done anything like this and certainly the first time for me doing this in VR.
I think about 90 of us were invited to the Discord server but I don’t know how many people like myself were invited to the beta test. The community was pretty active for its size. Although because we all live very different lives, some people were not able to participate right away. I was more active early on and then I had to step back because of other obligations, but I kept watch on some of the discussions as I was able.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was not even the only visually impaired person on the server or playing the game. I was also impressed by the quality of the feedback and suggestions that the developer was being given. It may come as no surprise that some of the people in the beta test group were themselves game developers or user interface designers.
Oh, but you want to know about the game? Okay, fine. For several years I was an on and off again player of the game Minecraft and I’m a big fan of open-world and sandbox games. So much so that I haven’t really finished a lot of games lately, because a lot of these games don’t have a win condition. Pocket Lands is very much in this same lane.
One thing I really love about Pocket Lands though is the built in ability to change from immersive, first person, to diorama modes. Diorama is so much better than just flying. I imagined that if I had the physical space to actually walk around the virtual object that I could have and that is something I find really cool. I loved building big objects quickly in diorama mode and then walking around inside making finer tweaks.
I think this has so much potential as a creative, explorative and collaborative platform that I think the developer could have unleashed a bit of a monster. I’m not the only one who believes this either.
Hold on tight my friends. We could be in for quite the interesting, if blocky ride.
Oh, and how was it to play as a visually impaired person? Better then some of the games I have tried. I think that with some minor tweaks the game could be made to work with many kinds of visual impairments. Meta has been experimenting with some enhancements for us visually impaired people but some are more useful than others and few help inside of games right now. If you are a visually impaired XR user, I would suggest that Pocket Lands is with a try.
