Talk:Virtual Guidedog
"VIRTUAL REALITY FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES"
IMAGINE... Imagine having a severe physical disability. You need help with almost everything. And even if you're lucky enough to be able to use a power wheelchair, your life experience may still be very limited. Narrow doorways, stairs, and cramped indoor spaces such as elevators, and even doctors' offices, (all too often designed only for healthy, able-bodied people), can make life a constant battle for emotional survival!
IT'S A HARD WORLD OUT THERE! I call the "RL" world, "the HARD world... and Virtual Reality environments are, the "SOFT" world... because the "hard" world is basically unchanging. But the "soft" world is a magical place where almost anything can happen! A narrow doorway is easily widened... or maybe you'd like a wheelchair that can go through walls?
In RL, (the hard world), there are assistive devices to help you do things. Everything from power wheelchairs to speech-assist machines. There are GPS devices for blind, and of course, hearing aids for deaf... but many of these things are expensive. And the medical safety-net here in the United States can't be depended upon to find, (and pay for), the device that works best for you. And even if you do get what you need, (and can hear and see, and get around), there's surprisingly little to do! Go to the store? Go to the movies alone? (Or take your home attendant with you, if the RULES even permit it?
And there are people that can't go out at all, because of severe illness or disability... and believe it or not, all too often, there ARE rules set down by various government agencies, restricting basic freedoms of people with disabilities!!
(Go to this address to read about the "Medicare Homebound Rule"... that forbids people from leaving their homes except to go to the doctor or to church!)
https://www.socialworkers.org/advocacy/alerts/2002/071602.asp
Some people with extensive facial deformity or disfigurement may keep themselves hidden... communicating mostly online, through newsgroups. The world of online Virtual Reality offers new freedoms for many thousands of people in the U.S. alone!
WE ARE VR! A virtual world can be a lot like "Talos IV," from an old Star Trek episode, "The Menagerie," where a severely disabled man, (Captain Pike), and a disfigured woman, (Vena), live on a planet with a race of beings that can create a kind of "lucid dream" environment, or "Virtual Reality,"... making them appear perfectly healthy.
While there are disabled people in Second Life that still choose to appear disabled inworld, (because they feel it's part of their identity), and others, (myself included), that would rather leave all that behind and appear as "normal" as it is possible or practical to be, the whole aim of the project, is that in addition to being able to appear as a tiger or a robot or Santa Claus, you can make some real changes that go beyond just entertainment! Eliminating part or all of a disability is totally life-changing! And of course, I'm not just talking about a physical or sensory impairment. A facial deformity for instance, can be a "social" disability. And for that matter, almost any significant disability may result in social problems!
THE PROJECT... The project is aimed primerily at the disability community. Anyone can change their appearance in SL if they choose. A man can be a woman inworld. Be a robot or a bird, or whatever! That stuff already exists in the Second Life environment. What we want to do is make this new world ACCESSIBLE to people with various disabilities. Physical, sensory, and certain types of "social" disabilities.
Interfaces will be gotten or designed to enable people with specific physical problems to move around and do things inworld easily.
For blind and visually impaired, we now have a program that can make the chat window talk. If everyone had this program, many more people could communicate inworld.
And there's the GUIDE-DOG PROJECT. Our guide-dogs can talk as well! They can tell you what's around you, find people and places! The only thing they don't do is make doody on the rug... (and the new more realistic ones will probably do that too!) :)
For hearing impaired or deaf, there's of course, the chat window for communication... but what most people don't know is many deaf people here in the US only know ASL, (American Sign Language), and they don't read English very well or at all. And I expect it's that way in other countries too. Contrairy to what people think, ASL is NOT English, spoken with hand signs! I devised a way for a deaf person to "hear" sounds with an assistive device. And this is an example of something that might never get built in the "real world" if it weren't first tried in SL! In RL, you need to build an actual "device." Making it durable etc., etc., takes a long time. Beta testing is also difficult in the real world. But in a virtual world, all that's needed is a computer program. This application will be mainly for people who don't read text from the chat window. Many do... and I've heard that some of those people were upset when voice chat came along because when people stopped using text, the deaf were now excluded.
PROGRESS! "Progress" almost always ignores and excludes the disabled. That's what we're trying to change here at Wheelies!
EMPLOYMENT... I hear people have actually made real money in SL! 70% of people with disabilities remain unemployed. In my mind it's a certainty that if you enable someone by giving them sight, hearing, and mobility in a world where other people are functioning normally... working and playing... (and it doesn't matter if the world is virtual or real), many of these "now, formally disabled" people will begin to function normally as well.
THE MATRIX... If things go the way we want them to, Second Life may contain the first Virtual Reality environment that actually has people "living" in it. (By that I mean they would spend most of their lives inworld. It'll take work and money but I think we're headed in that direction. People that cannot function in the real world will, I think, be the first to really bring virtual worlds to life.
THE JUNGLE! Just as our bodies are still built for life in the jungle, (we become ill unless we get out of our cars and exercise)... :) our minds are set to function in this "real world," (where you can't just teleport some place instantly, I'm proposing a "Real-Life" setting in SL, I guess, primarily for "experience-deprived" people. VR needs to be less like a magazine, where you can flip through images quickly as you teleport places... and more like the world our minds were made for, where you need to travel places by car, train or plane... and it needs to take some time to get there. Flying like Superman is also something I would eliminate when you choose the RL setting or are in a "RealWorld" area.
Where it shouldn't take seven hours to go somewhere, it should at least take enough time so you get the feeling you're actually going somewhere!!
And this will give real meaning to buying a shiny new car in VR! If we suddenly didn't need cars in the real world, and they were now just cool looking toys, I think most people wouldn't even consider getting a car. So even when it's possible to have a very realistic vehicle in SL, if you don't really NEED it to go somewhere, why bother getting one at all, (except for game-playing)?
A non-disabled person may own a car in the real world. It get's them to Grandma's house quickly and easily! :) They get what I call "vitamins for the mind" from things like that. They may enjoy their second lives but they're not in desperate need of the virtual life! Take the real world away from a person and they're in trouble unless you give them a virtual version of what they've lost.
My dream back in the early 1980's was to have a virtual envirnoment for people who absolutely could not function in the real world. In my mind there was the image of a child walking down a street and meeting a friend. "Hi! What cha' doin'? Wanna go to the movies later?" "Sure! Then after that, can you come over my house to play with my trains?"
I was envisioning giving life experience to people in general. But why did I conjure up the image of "children?" I thought of children first because of how important simple life experiences are to the young mind. Without these experiences we don't develope properly. Even if the body gets repaired later on, the window of oppertunity for the mind has passed. So in addition to giving quality of life in Virtual Reality to people, this project can give what we're calling "real world" quality of life as well.
SECOND LIFE IS NOT A GAME! Second Life is not a game... but I think people may soon start to realize how true that statement actuallly is! :)
Jonathan Rand Weelies Accessible Builds Project Guid Dog Project Talos IV Project