Ball Color Problem
 

Here is a minor thing that I'm hoping FIRST can maybe change.

While I was looking at the manual, my wife asked me what the difference was between the moon rocks and the empty cells. She is slightly color blind and cannot at all distinguish between the blue and the purple on those balls.

Obviously this is a bit of a problem from a spectator standpoint (for those unfortunate to have some degree of color blindness), but I really feel for drivers and coaches that may have this problem.

My wife suggests a red/blue ball rather than the orange purple. She says she can see the difference between the orange and red, but not the blue and purple.

Anyway, just a minor issue.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

some people with color blindness cant see reds either......
but still, they probobly took that int account when they were designing the game.....

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Yeah, I noticed this too. I'm red/green color-blind and I couldn't distinguish at all between the blue and purple strips and only very faintly distinguish between the red and orange strips.

Perhaps the empty and super cells' marked in some other way... (since there are only 16 total).

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I thought of this too when I was sitting with some teammates eating lunch.

Our coach is some what color blind so we'll have to see how that plays out.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Having just bought empty cells and super cells at the local Wal*mart, this turns out to be a not so small issue, not only for people affected by colorblindness, but also for people with perfect vision. Being able to tell if you're carrying more than one empty cell during the heat of the moment, as opposed to one empty cell and one moon rock will be extremely difficult under tournament conditions (i.e. lighting, glare, robot traffic, etc.).

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I'm not color blind but I am legally blind and I too cannot really tell the difference without being rather close.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Here's a picture from The Blue Alliance of all the different balls for reference

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3112/...e48bc1.jpg?v=0

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

^ Love that avatar (to smartkid if someone else posts first)... and I sympathize with the topic creator's problem. I'm not even colorblind, and I had a hard time telling the balls apart. Let's hope FIRST can be convinced to use better contrasting colors, or else this will be another officiating nightmare... I'm starting to be relieved they didn't let me be a ref! Aiden certainly won't be able to bring his newspaper to the real games...

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

It seems it wouldn't be too hard to suspend a blinking LED in the middle of a super cell using elastic bands.... although given the rules, perhaps an empty cell would be a better one to have stand out.

It is quite possible that this is an oversight by the GDC that they would like to rectify. Perhaps try redirecting this question to the Q&A forums.

Good point, I hope there is a solution,

Jason

Edit: a lycra cover over the cells might do the trick, too. The fabric ball cover worked last year.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

This could probably be easily fixed by FIRST. They could just wrap some electrical tape in stripes around the ribbons of the empty cells. The stripes should make the balls easy enough to distinguish without changing the balls (i.e. stopping hooks from grabbing them or raising their coefficient of friction)

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I have some color issues as well, looking at the manual I was having issues. But when I looked at the TBA picture, I could see the difference a little bit more. This is one of the worst decisions i have seen FIRST make for such an important point of the game design.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I'm Red/Green Colorblind, and I can only barely distinguish the Moon Rock and the Empty Cell when looking straight at them when they aren't moving (EG: If I pause the video or look at a picture) otherwise they are identical. This is rather annoying because I was hoping to drive for my team this year. (I designed the way it was driven, but never actually drove it till after the comp last year :( )

~DtD

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

yeah our team was discussing this... everything mentioned here was discussed, from the trouble distinguishing the balls for all people, especially color-blind people.

also discussed was the trouble the judges will have since they may not even be able to distinguish the balls... this could be a real hindrance, or it could be an interesting twist to this already very interestong game

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Thanks! I put that together in Photoshop using a backdrop from a project of mine and a picture of Jeremy from Code Lyoko. I love that show! :)

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I'm not colorblind at all, but judging from the picture, I would not be able to tell the difference between the two without close examination.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I used Picasa's "I'm Feeling Lucky" color correction feature on this photo. In the unmodified photo, it is slightly more difficult to distinguish between the Moon Rocks and Empty Fuel Cells.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I had to double take at the picture, because upon first glance blue and purple seem the same.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I agree. Imagine how hard it would be to see if that is a empty cell or a moon rock at the other end of the field through slightly scratched plexiglass, 6 out-of-control robots, and the fact that you have a stadium of people staring at you with lights above. Plus that great pulsing dance music!

This troubles me since my team apparently has quite a few color blind members. :(

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I completely agree that the balls; colors should be changed, but perhaps they should just take away the bicoloredness of the balls. If the balls were one different color each, they would be a lot easier to identify. Something tells me that this may be part of the challenge however...

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I do agree that the ball color is a problem, but I don't think that there is much FIRST can do at this point. The balls are made commercially in only three color paterns, so they had to use what was available. Maybe they should not have used these balls in the first place, but that is a totally different issue. I guess we will just have to work around this because the game will not change at this point.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

No, I'm pretty sure nobody in their right mind would decide to intentionally prevent a significant proportion of the population from participating in FIRST as a driver for a medical reason as "part of the challenge." The goal is to teach you to be engineers and change the world, not make you feel excluded because of the way you were born. Color blindness affects up to 10% of American males, and considering the overwhelming percentage that population holds of events, that's pretty significant.

Sometimes FIRST doesn't (no pun intended) see everything that can go wrong. That's fine, FIRST is composed of humans, it happens. Now that we have found a problem the professional thing for us to do is to figure out a solution for it.

If anybody has the game pieces handy and a can of spray paint would you be willing to test how well it adheres to the surface of the balls? Please permit the paint to dry and then pick up the pieces and abuse them a little...bang them on the table or something. Does the paint chip? Does the texture vary significantly between the painted and unpainted version? My experience says it shouldn't, but with something like this it is worth testing before we offer it as a valid solution.

If these tests prove to reasonably not alter the game pieces, may I recommend (dark) blue, (medium) red, and white to spray them? Frankly if you don't like those colors I do not care, they can always be changed, provided that the three are chosen to be significantly different shades/values/lightness (God knows every field that deals with it has a different name for the quality).

Once a solution is found a small, (and very polite), petition can be set up (possibly something even as unscientific as a poll here on CD) to express the level of concern this problem has brought about from FIRST members. Maybe the higher-ups will read it, maybe they won't, but the numbers will certainly prove useful for quoting if you want to call your local FIRST offices and the people managing the regionals asking them if they would kindly consider permitting you to tag the game pieces to make them more friendly for the color blind. This isn't something we can demand, regionals are notoriously understaffed (I mean, good volunteers do not grow on trees). However, if we are all willing to pitch in and make a change (yes, that probably means "doing it ourselves") the regionals are probably unlikely to get directly in our way.

That said, we can't request a change until we have a viable solution. Whatever it is it needs to be fast, easy, durable, and not significantly alter the playing pieces.

If nobody can get their hands on the materials to try spray paint well...I'll try to make a trip to the store myself as soon as I can. Keep us all posted with whatever you have. I'm pretty eager to work to resolve this.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Just throwing in that I too am red/green colorblind and cannot distinguish the ball colors. Picked up 6 orbit balls at Wal-Mart and I have no idea which type I got (with them in front of me to compare).

Perhaps an easy solution would be similar to the white spots on the tracballs last season... just some sort of white iron-on sticker would be perfect.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I too have a problem with the ball color. Being the tallest member of my team I would be the obvious choice for our human player because I can more easily negotiate the height of the wall. However, I'm blue-purple color blind and can not tell the difference between the moon rocks and the empty cells. I have not had a chance to read all of the comments to see if anyone has any ideas but I do hope that FIRST will find a solution to this problem before competion.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

when I saw the three different balls originally i noticed how closely the empty and the moon balls appeared to be. If u were in the heat of the game, these two would be difficult to distinguish between especially if they are 50ft away.

Im sure the manufacturer only produces these three variants but maybe enough criticism about the colors and they may produce a new, very distinguishable ball.

If they however do not change we can only hope that good eyesight and lots of practice will help "comfort" this problem. It has already been mentioned that the manufacture of these "orbits" are made by blip toys, which never mention their orbit ball on the website.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Like several of you, I am also colorblind and my first thought about the balls was, thank goodness i'm only a mentor :p lol. For those who are red/green and blue/purple (i happen to be both which sucks lol), I don't think changing the colors will help everyone. I mean, maybe if one ball was black and white, another blue and yellow, and another like red and white... then maybe. Like some have said, make petitions or something. Maybe even talk to your local regional director and see if any change can be made at that regional to help for those colorblind people out there. It's going to definately be more of a challenge to us colorblind folk, but we'll just have that much more fun and get a "better" color education out of this year's game :p As I said to my fiance one day, "I don't color, I shade" ... just think postively and PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE :D lol

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Instead of changing the colors, FIRST could make one ball striped and one ball solid. It would be easy enough to wrap tape on the orbit balls to stripe them without changing the feel of the balls.

Moon Rocks / Empty cell color similarity
 

We have been able to purchase several Orbit Balls from Wal Mart. We have representatives of three different color combinations. They differ from the game animation in that the yellow color seen in the animation for the moon rocks / empty cells is more orange in our samples (including the one from the KOP).

My concern is the similarity between the moon rocks and the empty cell. (orange and purple vs. orange and blue) The purple is not very different from the blue. I submit that if these are representative of actual game pieces, you will not be able to tell the difference from any distance. In the heat of competition, I can see teams grabbing multiple empty cells, thinking they are moon rocks, and getting penalized, simply because they couldn't tell the difference. If a team member is color blind (a very common mutation among males) it will be impossible to tell the difference.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I alone in my confusion? I can only hope that the actual game pieces will be obviously different from each other.

Re: Moon Rocks / Empty cell color similarity
 

Nope, you aren't alone.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=71049

Re: Moon Rocks / Empty cell color similarity
 

Yeah, a bunch of other people have pointed this out in other threads, and it appears that the actual game pieces have the same problem with color distinction. There will probably be some issues with distinguishing between colors, especially from all the way across the field, and I can definitely see penalties arising because of this. I wish they had done blue/orange, purple/green, and orange/green (instead of orange/purple) as the color combinations.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Perhaps they could swap the super cell and the empty cell colors. there is no penalty for carrying two super cells.

Re: Moon Rocks / Empty cell color similarity
 

Thanks, don't know how I missed that thread when I diligently searched before I posted ;)

Maybe a moderator can merge or delete this thread?

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I'm just going to point out that the fact that people are color blind isn't the only problem. Yes that will make it impossible for them to see the difference but its hard to see in the first place.

I've been on our drive team for three years and keeping track of what going on on the field is hard enough without distinguishing between slight color variations among 120 game pieces.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I think it would make a lot of sense if the empty cells were solid white, gray, black or brown. I mean, they don't have any energy, right? And this could easily be accomplished with some cans of spraypaint, or even better a big tub of real paint :p

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

i think they made it the way they did to make it so that color tracker's on your robot would be hard to use

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I don't think anyone plans to attempt to track balls with vision. The large tubular pink and green thing on top of the trailer mast is the vision target.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

they could have more than 1 targets...

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I'm pretty sure the "reason" it's that way is because they appear to be the only 3 colors combinations the that the balls come in (though I have not actually gone out to try and find other colors).

I agree that the color selection is a poor choice, but I don't believe FIRST had a choice other than to use different game pieces (which wouldn't have been that bad of an idea either, given the supply shortage).

The tape stripe is a very good idea IMHO.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Another problem is that of the spectators. Not to say that the drivers won't have problems, but spectators will probably have a huge problem distingusing the different balls from the stands (let alone those watching via webcasts). I fear that the suspense and excitiment of the end game and the 15 point Super Cells may be lost because the spectators won't be able to tell the difference between the balls. This seems to me a big step backwords from last year when the game was intended to be very spectator friendly.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Maybe FIRST can simply bleach one of the orange-blue or orange purple combos. That would eliminate the need to tape balls as some have suggested. They would be more difficult to see against the flooring but i think that's better than not being able to distinguish them from others.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

hmm... unfortunate for some, but i don't think there is any chance of "fixing it" it's too late. You will just have to deal with it. Perhaps changing it for next year, but this year has already started.

But, i would like to point out that i don't see that much of a problem with distinguishing the blue (empty) cells from the moon rocks (purple), becuase if you watch the animation (for those who aren't colorblind), then you can clearly see that the empty cells are hung up near the middle players who have to sit in the seats. The seated players are surrounded by the moon rocks on the floor, but the empty cells are neatly hung up to help avoid confusion. I don't think there will be a large percentage of Blue/Purple being mixed a whole lot on the floor. And... as for the Super cells (green) they are tightly controlled by the staff, and therefore won't be very many until the last 20 seconds.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Show of hands, who's keeping track of whether your can of Red Bull is falling on your car floor when you hit a patch of black ice at rush hour? It'll be difficult for the driver(s) (who happen to be in control and not paying attention to where the coach is pointing) to know where the balls are coming from, and so the color confusion remains. I'm not colorblind, in fact I'm kind of the opposite with photographic memory and synesthesia, but looking at the picture of the balls, my brain kind of deletes the blue and purple unless I really focus BECAUSE of those conditions. Peoples' minds will inherently go directly to concentrating on the orange because it's brighter and stands out more, and will make the task of distinguishing blue and purple nearly impossible.

I like the idea of just swapping the super cells and empty cells. THAT would add to the challenge, because by the last 20 seconds, you're TRYING to follow the super cells, and it will be hard for everyone. Tagging the balls would also be good, but I'm a little worried about modifying the weight of the balls, as this will make them more inconsistent and inaccurate to use in multiple cases in a simulated environment (object iterations in the robot's program).

I think relying on the camera to do color differentiation would be a very fun challenge, but not fair to rookie teams who have no CS major mentors and can barely tell the robot to go forward, much less deal with calibrating vision algorithm thresholds on-the-fly. Not to mention unfair to teams with 5 people on them, as this limits the time you can spend on code. It would not be like the GDC to assume teams can use the camera to pinpoint the correct balls. An obvious differentiation or rearrangement of ball types is a very reasonable request.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

I am not by any means a programing expert on this new system, and I have not really even played with the new system at all. But what about using the camera to figure out the difference.

I agree with a previous member, this might be a planed thing also. Because there is a lot of things in real life that you can not distinguish between very easily. This adds to the competition in my mind.

Let me know your thoughts.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

True, but the staff (field reset crew, scorers, and refs) will also have problems doing their jobs, because they, too, will have trouble distinguishing the colors, especially after a few hours on the job when they're starting to get tired. I think the colors are going to be a nuisance for most participants.

I've been reading some of the suggestions for altering the colors of the balls. Dying synthetic fabrics is tricky; if the covers were cotton, it would be a cinch, but they're not cotton. Bleaching synthetic fabrics probably wouldn't work without damaging the fabric. Paint would get rubbed off (onto robots and playing field--yuck).

I believe that someone who was good with cutting tools could remove the blue fabric entirely from the empty cells. I'm guessing that the underlying strips are either black, white, or a similar neutral color. This would not involve a huge amount of work, but would probably change the appearance noticeably.

The drawback would be that the empty cells would weigh less--hey, that makes sense; shouldn't empty cells be really light weight? ;). Their handling characteristics would also change. Handling characteristics and weight would also be affected if tape or lights were added, as some have suggested, or if a different color fabric were stitched over existing balls.

If the manufacturer supplies just these three colors, then the only choice FIRST has is:

--Stay with the inherent vision difficulties, or
--Cause a different kind of frustration with "homemade" alterations that might profoundly affect the robots' abilities to handle the game pieces.

(I suspect FIRST will not change anything about the game pieces; they have too much to do already.)

If your team could vote between vision problems and handling problems, which would you choose?

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

You think every Empty Cell will be loaded directly from the Outpost to a robot, delivered to the Airlock, and never hit the floor? I don't. There will be loose Empty Cells rolling around on the Crater. The Pilots and the referees will have to keep track of their use.

I'm also not sure about your comment about Super Cells being controlled by the staff. I didn't see anything about this in the rules; they are hung in the Fueling Port and can be exchanged for an Empty Cell by the Payload Specialist. Although the video showed a referee handing a Super Cell to a player, I don't think this is going to happen in the game.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Yes, this is potentially a problem. However, solutions for it introduce other problems. Many people here have suggested taping one type of ball - that tape poses two problems for robots: first, the ability to grip the ball changes, and second that tape could be pulled off the ball and into a teams mechanism. At this point, i think it's too late for them to change game pieces all together, and as they are the only 3 commercially available colors, they can't obtain other colors easily.

All that being said, an easy solution for this would be with a rule clarification from the GDC - rather than penalizing people for picking up multiple empty cells, they can penalize you for delivering more than 1 empty cell at a time to the fueling station. The intent of the rule is to prevent people from picking up all the empty cells from their outpost and delivering them to their fueling station at once - rather, you have to decide if the time trade off of running back and forth is worth it.

Lets face it - picking up multiple empty cells and dumping/shooting them into another robots trailer doesn't give a team any sort of advantage, especially if those empty cells were picked up accidentally amidst the hundred moon rocks on the field.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

Part of the problem is that the balls maybe only come in these colors, so how to change the colors? One solution has been black tape. Here are a couple more that should be easy to do with little manual effort:

1) Dye. It's cheap and can be bought at any departments store. How about dying the empty cells black or some other solid color.

2) Bleach. What about dunking the balls in a vat of bleach?

Any other solution suggestions would be great.

Re: Ball Color Problem
 

The balls only come in 3 colors, that is one of the reasons that they only could do the 3 colors. I agree that they might be able to change it. We should just sit back and watch though. Because the first team update did not change any of the colors. And I have not heard it yet. I think that we will know forsure when first starts selling the balls directly. If they only sell the 3 colors then I think the balls will just stay the same color during the game. I think it would be a large job for first to now go change the game pieces. I think that people will just have to live with the problem and find a possible solution.