This week EA announced they were adding 23 patents to their accessibility patent pledge. In addition, they released a new open-source project, the IRIS Unreal Engine plugin which can be used to detect photosensitivity moments in games. This plugin is built upon the already open source IRIS library and is released under the BSD 3 open source license.
Details of the new patents being pledged from Electronic Arts:
Gaming is–and should be–for everyone.
For years now, EA has strived to make gaming as inclusive as possible and to minimize barriers between our players and our shared love for video games. And today, in this spirit and following International Day of Persons with Disabilities we have added 23 accessibility-centered patents to our industry-first accessibility patent pledge. Through this pledge, launched in 2021, we share our accessibility-related technology with the wider industry royalty-free, so that together we can work towards meeting the needs of our diverse gaming community at EA and beyond.
These newly pledged patents cover technologies to improve speech recognition, generate more personalized speech and simplify the use of speech recognition technologies in computing and gaming devices.
Among other things, these patented accessibility technologies could be used to improve the gameplay experience of players who have speech disability or who prefer or need assistance with verbally expressing themselves. They could make it possible for those players’ speech to be more effectively recognized and reflected in-game in a way that is representative of their age, emotion, language and speaking style.
To Blanca Macazaga Zuazo, Software Designer for Player & Quality Insights (PQI) Tech at EA, one of the most exciting contributions being made today is the open sourcing of a new EA-developed plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that enables in-engine use of EA’s photosensitivity analysis tech, IRIS, which was itself open-sourced as part of last year’s pledge update.
After all, Blanca is one of the key developers of IRIS and its new plugin, and has made it her mission to create, improve and evolve accessibility-based technologies to allow as many players to play and have fun as possible.
Details of the pledge itself:
Electronic Arts (EA) promises not to enforce against any party for infringing any of the listed EA patents. A list of patents subject to this pledge can be found below, and EA may add additional patents to this pledge at a later date.
EA makes this pledge legally binding, irrevocable (except as under “Defensive Termination”) and enforceable against EA and all subsequent patent owners of the listed patents. This pledge does not provide any warranties or assurances that the activities covered by pledged patents are free from patent or other intellectual property infringement claims by a third party.
Key Links
New Patent Pledge Announcement
EA Patent Pledge for Increasing Accessibility
IRIS Unreal Engine Plugin GitHub
You can learn more about the EA patent pledge for accessibility as well as learn more about open-source projects from Electronic Arts in the video below.