"Super" players with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Twenty-first-century Walter Mittys wandering through imaginary lives.
Up to this point, three-dimensional Internet soap operas like Second Life have fulfilled more fictional aspirations than fiduciary responsibilities, but that's going to change - and fairly quickly. And when it does, where will that leave roughly 750 million people around the world whose very real disabilities prevent them from participating?
If IBM has its way, it will leave them with the option to engage in their own second lives.
Increasingly, virtual worlds are being used to conduct real business involving everything from training and education to science and entertainment. More and more collaboration among customers, business partners and commercial enterprises is taking place in 3-D online universes, and players can make real money by opening, say, a jazz club and charging online visitors admission to hear musicians play real-time riffs. The Gartner Group predicts that by the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users will have their own avatars, or online versions of themselves1.
But right now, say Guido Corona and Bill Carter, 3-D Internet environments are largely inaccessible to people with some disabilities and they'd like to see what they can do to change that. Carter is a software developer with IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Center (HA&AC), where Corona also works as a strategy consultant. Accessibility is a topic of particular importance to Corona, who's blind.
The challenges involving accessibility to virtual worlds, Carter and Corona explain, are related to mobility, hearing, overall cognition and low vision or blindness. Users with limited mobility experience difficulty controlling a mouse, for example, and most virtual world applications offer limited or no support for screen readers.
The big push
But the news isn't all bad, and it's definitely getting better. An interface requiring only the ability to push one button has been developed by Eelke Folmer2 of the University of Nevada, for instance, and preliminary techniques to help make virtual worlds accessible to the blind are being researched at IBM.
"Think of a virtual world as a graphical user interface (GUI) application that behaves like a vast extension of a classic Web browser," Corona advises. "The avatar's general vicinity in that world could be made to be analogous to a Web site, and nearby virtual objects could be thought of as the site's content. Moving to a different location in the virtual world would be like opening a different Web site or Web page."
Imagine a blind traveler in a virtual world hitting a hot key that causes the system to announce, through screen-reader technology or braille, a list of items in a three-meter radius. A key combination might be used to move the visitor's online personality closer to an object, which would then announce what operations are available through the use of embedded metadata, or annotations. When the user wants to move, she directs the GUI to transfer her avatar to the next spatial frame north of where she is and then generates another list of nearby items.
"A person who is blind in a virtual setting may need to establish selective perception filters," adds Corona, "to limit cognitive overload." In other words, forget the decorative vase; it has no operational value. Tell me the names of the avatars standing around me, and clue me in on what they're saying.
"We're confident that it's possible to provide a high degree of accessibility for blind people in virtual worlds," according to Carter.
One IBM research platform, for instance, allows experimentation with accessibility techniques. It's completely non-pictorial and screen-reader-friendly, and is designed to eventually allow access to several virtual worlds using the same user interface.
"In our early research we've identified some new software techniques that show a way forward," Carter says, "and we are tremendously excited about the possibilities."
Virtually speaking.