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Challenge: DDR / Step Mania for wheel chair.

e14 Contributor

Since the forum ate my post with a "zero size object" error, wherein I'd figured out how to do some of the difficult bits, I'll just post this.

 

I'd love to see a controller that enables people in wheel chairs, paraplegic or quadriplegic, to play DDR and similar games, including the up/down and left/right simultaneous combos.

  • What would they use for an interface?  You thinking joystick control?  For people that still have use of their hands, DDR alreadly allows controller control but if they don't, then it would get interesting.  I could see joystick control for UDLR and do the beatmania thing for the angles, no idea on the LR and UD doubles though o_0

     

    Sounds interesting.

  • in reply to colecago

    Large, padded impact buttons to push the chair into. Put a bar in front of and behind the chair and one to each side. To do left and right, pivot the chair so the footrest or an attachment hits the button.

     

    With practice it should be possible to hit both buttons in a corner. For the UD or LR combos I came up with an idea for a two stage button. The second stage would have a heavier spring and its switch would be wired in parallel with the first stage switch of the opposite button.

     

    Bump extra hard in any of the four directions and it works the same as a standing player stepping on the two pads. Some electronics would be needed to avoid a three or four button press from harder hits into corners.

     

    How well the two stage buttons would work would depend on how tight the timing is in the games for detecting the UD and LR pairs. Perhaps Stepmania could be modified to provide lookahead feedback to the controller? Combine that with a switch reading system that detects which first stage switches were hit first so it'd properly detect an Up Left move even if the player hit hard enough to trigger both buttons' second stage.

     

    The sequence would be the game sends the upcoming step requirements to the controller then the controller reads the player's input to determine if it matched what the game wants next, then sends the player's input (correct or not) to the game. If the game wants Up Left but the player moves Down Left and moves Down hard enough to trigger the second stage, the controller was sent Up Left immediately before and would not expect the player to have mistakenly attempted to do Up Down.

     

    Experimenting would be required to see what works best. Ideally the controller should work without any modifications to the games.

     

    Testing of the two stage UD and LR concept could be done with a joystick, which could then be implemented as a controller for people who only have the use of one hand.