Does Interactive Fiction Need Visuals?

Your best bet for mass adoption and scale bringing the price down is the development of full body immersion tech. The tactile stuff would be solved as a part of the entire illusion. Reminds me of the fictional full body haptic feedback VR suits depicted on the tv show Upload. That said, I have no idea what the state of the art actually looks like for that; I wouldn’t be surprised if that sort of research is kept on the downlow until they have something worth patenting.

Hey, you found out my middle name! :smiley: “Naïve” being the nickname!

EDIT - Real-life example, didn’t Stephen Hawking’s condition encourage the industry to allow him to communicate ASAP, and didn’t the fallout from that positively impact the availability of that technology? Not immediately, but made possible quicker by? Not that he was the billionaire in that scenario, accourse.

EDIT - Craaaaaaap, am I derailing ANOTHER thread?! Ok, forget about Stephen Hawking! Interactive Fiction does not NEED visuals, but they’re nice when well done; and for some of us, yeah, the allure of “you don’t need to have any graphical ability” is a mighty incentive to try our hand at writing IF! :smiley:

1 Like

I don’t know where hawking fits into the development pipeline, but text-to-speech does have the advantage of being able to piggyback off the sound hardware most computing devices have built-in and audiobooks can use the exact same tech used for music recording… Plus, giving a computer voice commands and it responding verbally is a sci-fi trope older than the microcomputer and plenty of sighted people would rather listen than read, so plenty of mainstream demand to help push things beyond the robotic voices that existed in the DOS era or encourage recordings be made of books without grant money from a disability advocacy group. Adding tactility beyond that provided by haptics and physical controls(which have become an endangered species thanks to touchscreens worming their way into places they don’t belong and being used to replace traditional control schemes instead of supplementing), you kind of need new, non-standard hardware… doesn’t help that the existing tech mostly relies on a physical, millimeter-scale pin for each tactile pixel, the need to individually actuate those pins, and thousands of pins being needed even for low resolutions(The APH Monarch has a 32*10 braille character resolution or a 64*40 pixel resolution, 2560 individual pixels… the TI-83 has a screen resolution of 96*64 and a standard linux console is 80*25 characters… and the monarch cost like 15 grand… for about a third the graphical resolution of an old graphing calculator and less than a quarter the text space of a standard Linux console… though I understand even Braille displays with a single 14-character line of capacity go for a few hundre.

4 Likes