EA Shares Five Technology Innovations via Accessibility Patent Pledge

EA shares some of its innovative features implemented in games and encourages other developers to commit to the cause and do the same. Earlier today, Electronic Arts has announced that publishers and developers will have complete, free access to five patents from their technology, which involve technologies and features that have been implemented in EA’s games.

The five patents that EA will share leverage the effort to helping developers and publishers around the world. One of the technologies planned to be given away is the widely praised Ping System in Apex Legends, the most renowned Battle Royale game from EA’s catalog.

The ping system is hardly replaceable, as we remember back in the days when Apex Legends was released. No other game had this feature, at least not to this extent of perfection. I remember Fortnite being the most played Battle Royale at that moment, which obviously tried to mimic the ping system in Apex Legends during the release of the next consecutive season. Even though Epic Games succeeded in that, sadly, up to this day, the ping system in Fortnite doesn’t feel as convenient as in Apex Legends.

The rationalization for this move is inspired by one goal only: to aid the players with various disabilities, suffering from bad hearing, speaking, or having vision issues. Accessibility, before all, is what EA’s trying to say. Starting today, EA’s Accessibility First Patent Pledge grants complete and free access to five patents.

As shared by gamesindustry.biz, the shared patents include the following:

Ping System that allows players to transmit contextually aware audio and visual communications generated via mappable controller inputs.

• Contextually Aware Communications Systems in Video Games (Patent No. US 11,097,189), which includes Apex Legends’ famous ping-system.

Image processing that improves visibility of colors to optimize for color vision deficiencies.

• Systems and Methods for Automated Image Processing for Images with Similar Luminosities (Patent No. US 10,118,097 and CN 107694092).

Automatically detecting contrast ratios in pixel regions of rendered frames and updating regions having subpar contrast ratios to meet contrast ratio standards or thresholds.

• Contrast Ratio Detection and Rendering System (Patent No. US 10,878,540).

Generating personalized music based on a user’s hearing information and stylistic preference to best comport with that user’s hearing issues.

• Personalized Real-Time Audio Generation Based on User Physiological Response (Patent No. US 10,790,919).

EA has also revealed that additional patents may be added to the pledge at a later date.

“We want to encourage this, we want to be bringing others along,” EA’s Chris Bruzzo told gamesindustry.biz. He further revealed that there will be no license fees for using the listed technologies. EA has also released a source code for a tuneable colorblindness solution on GitHub.

Would any of the other sounding developing companies join the cause? That remains a mystery, but seeing the first move being made by EA makes me very happy.