Motor racing game and smartphone developments

00:08S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from December the 5th, 2023. I'm Stephen Jolley. Great to have you with us listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, Associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech and downer can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast.

With me, someone who can explain all the tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge David, we have a guest this week returning after the period in May teaming up with you, and it's good to have Michael Hart back again.

01:04S2

Yep. Hi, David. Hi, Stephen.

01:05S3

Indeed. What I may have mentioned, in fact, I did mention probably about which I want to say maybe over a month ago was the Forza motorsports 2023 the new accessible version of that game. And when I talked about it, they were talking about the fact that, you know, it was all accessible, you know, blind and low vision, and other people could play it. It had all these audio type functions to let you play the game. It had these different options to allow you to sort of better control your car, all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I listened to a few YouTube videos on it, but I thought, wouldn't it be nice to actually really talk to somebody in reality that's actually been playing with the game? 

So what I thought, well, when I spoke to Michael a couple of weeks ago, I said, you know, when you're comfortable with using the game, I'll get you on talking tech to have a chat about it. So Mark, welcome to the program again. And my question for you up front is when you install the actual game, is it sort of up front where you've got the accessibility options, and what are the main ones that you think you need to turn on to play the game?

02:14S2

Yeah, it's straight up. As soon as you boot it up on the Xbox, the first thing that comes up is an audio menu asking you what you want to do, if you want to turn on screen reader things like that, which is very quick and easy to do. So I found that really good, which that also works on the Xbox Cloud gaming. So if you have an Xbox Game Pass, you can also cloud game this. You don't have to actually install it. So but it it then quickly gives you a quick menu of turning on heavy assists, which is used for blind gaming, which turns on a lot of a lot of assists like steering assist, braking assist. I don't think it sets up throttle assist to start with, but then it also turns on all the audio cues for the edge of the road brake zones, things like that.

03:11S3

Okay. Yeah. So with this heavy assist stuff on initially, do you still feel like you're driving the car or is it a bit too automatic?

03:21S2

Well, from the start, I suggest you if you are a blind gamer or even really, really low vision like I am, I definitely suggest turning it all on and just playing around with it to start with, because you definitely need it right? Until you get used to the audio cues to understand what they're all doing. So basically I left them on for a good while. I'd like to say two weeks before I even thought about turning them off. And it's still fun to play. It's really enjoyable because you're doing the full acceleration and you can still over accelerate on corners and things like that, and still you can still, unless you've got all the stability control and traction control on which I'm now that far into the game, I've turned all that off, all the traction control and things like that. 

So I can spin the car, I can do donuts on the straight, but once you get more used to it, what I really suggest is just turning off the I have it on partial assist for the braking, which will basically you can just hold your finger flat on the throttle and and for the most part it'll go all the way around the track.

04:32S3

But okay, so when you turn these functions off, I mean, that was all partially off. It sounds really good. The audio cues are there sort of 1001 audio cues to remember, or are there sort of like several main ones if you like that you can remember, like going close to the edge of the road, all that sort of stuff.

04:51S2

There are quite a few. You can turn some of them off, like I don't have all the gear shifting off on or anything like that. I just basically have the edge of the road, the braking zone, which tells you you're going too fast when you're coming into the braking zone and the actual cornering. As you go through the corners. There's three sounds and so it'll do the first sound, the second sound, and then a higher pitched sound to tell you coming out of the corner. So you know, to accelerate. Okay.

05:18S3

So it's really not it's really not overwhelming then in a way.

05:21S2

It is to start with because you're listening. And I forgot to mention the engine sounds which will move from left to right. So the engine noise will go to the left. If you're coming into a left hand corner, the idea is to try and center that engine sound to to make sure you're cornering at the right speed. But it is overwhelming to start because you're listening to the engine noise, the road noise and everything. So but once you get used to it, it's a lot of fun.

05:47S3

Okay, and just one final question. Could you play with other players online?

05:52S2

No, no, I haven't tried a private gaming server yet because the multiplayer servers to play this, you can't you cannot play with cars turned on like you can race against other cars, but you have it so you drive straight through them because it'd be impossible to overtake them. This does not even try to overtake you. Just keep ramming into the back of them, okay?

06:12S3

Yep. Now what we probably should clarify is. So when we said you can play it on Xbox Series X and Xbox Cloud, so the Xbox console is fine. But when you're talking about xCloud, that's really windows. It's not on the Mac, I'm assuming.

06:26S2

Oh, I did actually test that because I thought this would be great on a mac. But no, unfortunately there's no Xbox app for the Mac, whereas window it comes pre-installed with with Windows 10 and Windows 11. And you can install the games, but you can you can just play it through cloud, which basically streams it like a movie, and it's very stable. I play it on my computer all the time, but you will need an Xbox controller plugged into your computer.

06:54S3

Yes. Sounds fantastic. So the price of the game, is it fairly expensive.

06:59S2

To purchase the game outright? You're looking at about $115, but if you pay for an Xbox game Pass, which is about $19 a month for the ultimate you, that gets you the game and you can play it as much as you like. So when you get bored with it or you don't want to play it anymore, you just stop the subscription and it may have only cost you six months.

07:22S3

Excellent. Fantastic. All right. So what I'll do in the show notes, I'll pop a link into there where people can find out more information about it. I've still got the YouTube link from a month or so ago. So thanks Michael for the very quick but good, concise overview of Forza motorsport. My poor little PC is not strong enough to probably play the game, so hopefully for my Christmas I'll be getting an X-Box X series. So again, thanks for coming on the program.

07:47S2

No problem at all and I hope people enjoy the game, because it's great to see all these accessible games coming out.

07:54S1

Michael Hart from Central Queensland, Gladstone speaking with David Woodbridge about one of the amazing games you can play with your X-Box. Have a good festive season Michael.

08:06S2

Thank you Stephen.

08:08S1

Now, David, we were talking last week about the Object Detector app, and you were going to go away and play with some way of attaching the phone around head height. Tell us.

08:20S3

I was talking about and I did, and I bought this sort of $16 fabric headband. So it goes around your head in the band. It's got a clip on the front of it that holds your phone in portrait landscape mode, and it's got a sort of a band that sort of goes from front to back over the top of your head to sort of try and hold your phone on. Now, I thought this would be a great way of using the obstacle detector app to detect tree branches and overhanging signs. I didn't get to try out signs, but tree branches and so on did not work at all because they're not really that massive as in, you know, a big wall in front of you or a big truck or whatever else. It didn't really work. 

And the second thing I found out about is, depending on the weight of your phone, it's really uncomfortable to to have basically a phone on your forehead. So my 14 Pro Max, which is actually quite big, it was horrible to use on my head. The back of the band kept slipping forward. I know why now. People have huge sort of these virtual headsets on their head that really hold them tight. So as a bit of a test run, this was a bit of a failure. It's just the weight. It's really uncomfortable. I've got to try it with my 12 pro and we'll see how that goes back. Yeah. Initially the the reports and the results so far are not favourable.

09:41S1

Let's talk Vision Australia's vision store now. The cut off date for ordering for the West was last Friday the 1st of December, still this Friday the 8th of December. But you can visit a store and still buy stuff, can't you, right up to Christmas.

09:58S3

That's right. Because we've really been saying, you know, if you order stuff that's not in stock in the shop or in the warehouse, then you're going to wait for it. So that's that was before the, you know, the the shutdown date before Christmas to make sure you get it. Otherwise, yes, you can walk into any Vision Australia office where the vision stores are. And as long as something in stock on the shelves, you can buy it. So I lost my audio liquid level indicator a couple of weeks ago and I thought, well, I better go and get a new one. So I popped into the vision store last week and grab one, and now it's up and running again, so to speak. So yes, you can definitely pop in the vision. Australia is open until the 22nd of December, which is the Friday. So yes, the the shop as they say will be opened for business.

10:46S1

Now this one reminds me of Lost Super. But it's not quite like that. It's about Gmail accounts that you may have had over the years. There's things to talk about with those.

10:58S3

What Google said back in May this year was that any unused accounts that have not been used for two years at all will start to be deleted. Now that didn't say they'd all go at once as of December 1st. They said they're going to start looking at the accounts and deleting them, and you will get a warning if you've got a recovery email or a phone number attached to those old accounts, which it may not have. But the best way to find out that if you've got an old account that's been wandering around that you don't even know about, if you go to accounts dot google.com in there, you can actually search for your old email accounts. And I've had a few floating around that I've only used for testing. So if they go, I don't really care about it. 

But as long as you use the account for, you know, sending and receiving an email or you sign up to a third party subscriber service, they're also classified as active email addresses. So have a look. If you don't need them, then, you know don't worry about them. But definitely two years and this will be a policy from now on. So if you don't use an email account for two years, even moving forward, now you'll get a notification saying, well, if you don't do anything, the account will be deleted.

12:17S1

One of the nice things you can do these days, if you've got a smart device, a phone or a tablet that's got a camera in it, even a computer actually. But I'm thinking of more the mobile device, so you can link up with somebody in a video way, and that can be a great help to people to find things out or have things read to you or explain or whatever. But there's different ways you can do it, isn't there?

12:41S3

There is. And if you want to find out something, or you want to just double check something with a person, I'm always amazed that you can just pop your hand in your pocket, grab out your phone and have a quote video link with a friend or somebody else through video link. Now, because I'm an iPhone user, I use FaceTime on my iPhone. But of course, if you're using Android, you can use the WhatsApp service. And of course you can also use the. Of audio and other services as well. 

It's just amazing because back in the old days before video link, you'd have to ring up somebody and say, look, I think I'm near the shop. Can you sort of like try and talk me through where I am? Whereas now you've can't quite find the door of the shop. You just ring up the video chat with the person, point the camera around and they go, yep, go left, go right or you're in front of the wrong shop. Just go to your right about ten meters and so on. It's basically instant assistance, as I say.

13:37S1

Absolutely amazing. Before we go, a reminder of where people can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

13:46S3

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David would be r dot podbean pod b com. David would be dot podbean pod-b-e-a-n - dot-com. To write to the program. You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge - how it sounds - at visionaustralia.org

14:07S1

David dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia dot org. This has been Talking Tech - with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. We also heard from Michael Hart telling us about that amazing motorsport game. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.