Products You May Like
Electronic Arts has announced that five of its patents related to accessibility technology in video games are now free for other developers and publishers to use.
Under its new “patent pledge,” EA promises not to charge anyone for taking advantage of its patented technology or take legal action against such parties provided that they don’t file any kind of patent proceedings against EA. The purpose of this pledge is to “break down barriers for players living with disabilities or medical issues.”
The pledge covers the following patents:
- CONTEXTUALLY AWARE COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM IN VIDEO GAMES: Ping System that allows players to transmit contextually aware audio and visual communications generated via mappable controller inputs.
- SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR AUTOMATED IMAGE PROCESSING FOR IMAGES WITH SIMILAR LUMINOSITIES (two patents): Image processing that improves visibility of colors to optimize for color vision deficiencies.
- CONTRAST RATIO DETECTION AND RENDERING SYSTEM: Automatically detecting contrast ratios in pixel regions of rendered frames and updating regions having subpar contrast ratios to meet contrast ratio standards or thresholds.
- PERSONALIZED REAL-TIME AUDIO GENERATION BASED ON USER PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSE: Generating personalized music based on a user’s hearing information and stylistic preference to best comport with that user’s hearing issues.
EA believes that its pledge will help promote innovation in the industry and “incentivize” other companies to come up with their own technical solutions, which in turn will create “a cycle of innovation.” The company wants video games to be accessible to everyone, and is also open sourcing solutions via its GitHub.
[Source: EA]