Half-silvered mirrors. That could be the solution. Previously I'd been wondering about getting eye-gaze and more versatile switch control over console games, having a Heads Up Display to assist. Seems this could be easier now than I'd previously thought. Three steps...
1. Getting PC compatible controls to take control of an Xbox 360/PS3 seems possible already (via an XIM 3 or Cronus adapter). That's potentially great news. The PC has by far the largest range of compatible accessible controllers and controller utilities of any platform. How well this works needs to be proven through more testing.
2. Getting key PC graphics such as the mouse pointer on top of a games console image may be less expensive than I feared, stops your eyes having to dance between two screens rapidly, and makes eye-gaze control feasible.
I wondered about using professional HDMI video mixing technology until "Georgli" on the Accessible GameBase forum had the inspired idea of using half-silvered glass mounted at 45 degrees between a console monitor and PC monitor (see the video below). This is a slight variation on an old coin-op arcade game trick used to make basic black and white displays more appealing in the 1970s (see the Space Invaders picture above). Not sure how well this would work, but it's got to be worth a try.
Things needed? Some carpentry skills, a half-silvered (aka two-way) mirror such as from Mirror World, two identical monitors, with at least one that can reverse flip it's image across the horizontal plane (via a PC graphics card if not).
3. Test playing to see how well it works in practice. It would be great to see this become a reality for players, and maybe there's a chance that the likes of 4Noah switch utilities, anti-tremor devices, head-trackers and eye-trackers will be enabled more people to play console games. It's likely that head-tracker and eye-gaze users will need something like Alt-Controller or Mouse Raider to get greater control. Looking forward to finding out.
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