Solutions for gaming with disabilities?

[kolaf]

Hi,

I am on the lookout for a control solution that would allow me to play games which I currently am unable to play due to my disabilities. I used to play FSX using trackIR to control the viewpoint, but for the time being it is too tiresome for me to use the joystick to control the plane. Similarly, using a mouse to control a game environment is not possible.

What I envision is something like using trackIR to control a first person view directions, and having the character move forwards and backwards depending on my distance to the screen, similarly for sidestepping by moving my head left and right. up and down could the jump and Crouch. Firing could be achieved by using a big red button/footpedal or something, and more advanced functions could be controlled using speech recognition (I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking daily).

Do any of you have any suggestions regarding existing solutions, possible games, possible games setups that supports/could support something like this? If you have any ideas of how I can resume my flight simulator use I would also be very grateful. I believe it should be possible to control something like battlefield 2 in this manner with some practice.

I appreciate your help,
Frank Olaf

[VincentG]

Answered over the phone

[kolaf]

Yes, it was answered over the phone, but I'm also starting to make some headway into the problem myself. I found the mouse emulator mode of trackIR which solves the problem of head movements in something like battlefield two. I also found trackmapper which allows mapping head movements to keyboard shortcuts. However, this only supports the view directions, not head movements (i.e. up and down, back and forth, and from side to side). It is therefore not possible to trigger the game character movements by moving my head around.

I have written to the author of trackmapper and requested that he resumed developments, or possibly release the code as open source to allow me to improve it myself. I have also read in the forums that keyboard emulation will be supported natively by trackIR sometime in the future. I hope this will include support for mapping head movements other than the single view directions.

I now have two challenges. The first is to get the character movement incorporated into head control as described above. The other is to get the mouse emulation to work even though the trackIR software is minimised. This would allow me to use it to control Windows. I assume I will not get any suggestions for this here given that it is the domain of smartnav, and thus probably a deliberate feature.

By the way, I'm not sure which is the correct forum for this ad is equally relevant for trackIR version 5.

[kolaf]

edited for content -

Any questions regarding use of the TrackIR SDK, should be emailed thru the TrackIR sdk page -

http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/05- ... h-sdk.html