Slashdot Mirror
New Graphic Displays for the Blind
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Spain have invented a new mechanism for graphical tactile displays for the blind. The displays use metallic films featuring various shape memory alloys which are produced layer by layer on silicon wafers using thin film technology. Display pixels are generated when the metallic film adjusts its curvature partially, similarly to bimetal snap plates for temperature switches. The movement of the films is then transferred to the touch panel via plastic pins und thus can be detected by the user."
though you do however, fail at life.
I.e. I realize that something that is fairly "color deep" like my christmas webcam is probably undoable, but what about simple stuff like a red rose?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I admit it, I'm just too dumb to understand this article, or even the summary for that fact!
There was a blind student who graduated in my CIS class. That is freak'n amazing. It is still nice to see that technology is trying to make life a little easier for them though.
deflin39
The displays use metallic films featuring various shape memory alloys which are produced layer by layer on silicon wafers using thin film technology.
Which, when placed under the skin, can be used to mirror the image back out for those with vision.
Damn you, using your eyesight to get an advantage. How are blind people supposed to get the fp?
Why can't they just use the CLI? The only good reason not to is for multimedia, which obviously a blind person wouldn't care about, and multiple virtual terminals, which nowadays you can just do with Ctrl+F1, Ctrl+F2, etc. Why not use that instead of this presumably horribly expensive item?
Le français vous intéresse?
It's a bunch of pins going through a board that you can press your hand or face or whatever against and make an impression.(I did some googling for this, but the terms I could think of were too general)
If you could put a servo on each of those pins, it seems like you could pretty easily achieve the same result.
You might wonder why these devices need to be so complex when Braille is just a series of dots. The thing is that Braille is a lot more complex than people think. (I think this is interesting but apologies if it's a little off-topic.)
Type I Braille is basically a 1:1 mapping of letter onto 2x3 arrays of dots. It's not much more than a font, but this is what people tend to think of as Braille.
Type II Braille uses a lot of abbreviations, and is rather more complex to read. For example, certain punctuation marks coincide with word abbrevations, and only the context serves to differentiate the too.
Type III Braille is still more complex and is almost like a whole other language. I don't know much more about it than that, but anyone who does can add to this.
So you see that the increasing complexity of these devices actually makes life a lot easier for blind computer users. I wonder how many blind people read Slashdot?
apterous.org
...going full speed in Defender would be like a vibrator!
I have to wonder if blind users of technology have a subtle sense of interpretation that is above or beyond what we eyeballers have.
Most people (including me) think that they have better powers of perception that do not rely on visual interpretation (which is what we all do here).
OMG, I just visualized the goat guy computouch device, eww!
Idiot... you got the trolling links swapped. Thanks for the GMail accounts though, MUAHAHAHA!!!
Why not just hook them up to the BrainPort? A step closer to helping them "see" again......
this one . Yep.
I think it would be interesting if the pixels actually made an audible snap when they change. I don't have any visual disabilities, but it would seem that Braille offers no equivalent to the peripheral vision sighted people use to take full advantage of a large graphical display. Such snap sounds (if done subtly enough) could be a small step in that direction. A "multimedia experience" of sorts for the visually impaired.
Then again, Braille terminals may already have this: in the movie Sneakers the terminal used by Whistler was making sounds as it was updated, but that may have been artistic license by the director.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Vokimon.
What's wrong with a dense grid of piezoelectric buttons tightly aligned in a grid? Maybe under a thin, tough mylar sheet? Why go micro when you can go mini?
--
make install -not war
... or Asian 4 The Blind. Finally!
But I wonder if tactile porn is better than visual. Any wiseguy who would like to comment on that?
One hand on the mouse and another on the screen. They could but somehow I feel they wouldn't enjoy it as much...
I'm sure the visually impaired/blind can't wait 'til Playboy ditches their braille editions in favor of a graphical tactical display version.
Its articles may be worth reading, but that's not why you buy the magazine now is it?
My "blind guy & pr0n" comment from the last time this subject popped up was modded as flamebait. Please mod parent down as flamebait, because blind people don't like pr0n, being sexless as they are. /end sarcasm
Vote Quimby!
I can see that I am uncultured now, Thanks For helping!
Seriously though, I vaguely remember hearing that there were 3 types of Braille, but at the time I remeber feeling slightly confused, but not pursuing the matter... Now it makes much more sense and helps me realize that there is more to the issue than I thought...
Gravity Sucks
We describe colors as warm and cold, as "expanding" or "contracting", as compound or pure, as a tint or as a shade, I think these might translate well to physical properties that the blind can relate to through their sense of touch. But us as a human race, being heavily blinded by our sight, will take a long time to figure it out, methinks.
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From the credit-where-credit-is-due department: The research was done by a group in Germany, and recognized by an organization for the blind in Spain.
I can feel my porn.. :)
I once watched a special about this institute for the blind that teaches SONAR. This is done by the blind person 'clicking' (much like sonar) and hearing the sound bounce off nearby objects like trees, thus locating them. absolutely amazing.
Even the blind get to see advertisements on the internet! Who will they go for next? The dead?
You forgot that, born blind peoples do not build anything picture in their brain as you do.
What you can sense and understand under your fingers, remain two dimentionnal relative to the surface you touch. That's all of it, if you have never percieved any projected 3D to 2D picture of the world arond you, as a pair of working eyes bring you from your birth.
Unability to see during the weeks near birth, permanently desable you to develop and construct your visual cortex. That's precisely the reason blind born childs must be cared of if medecine can cure it. It is too late after some months with irrecoverable decrease in sight ability as weeks passes.
Transforming photographs or prospect drawings into levels or textures, will never work for born blinds and will be quite touth to guess for late blinds.
Léa Gris
if you brush your hand over your keyboard or mousepad and close your eyes can you not construct an image?
...or not hard for that matter...anyhow they are "seeing" stuff in their heads. The eyes, at this point, are a distraction.
Do you really think such an ability is only the relm of the sighted?
Certainly they with no sight will have a different image, but will it be any less nuanced?
I think not.
With my wacko conjecture above I am merely imagining that you could take a camera and a graphical tactile glove and via stimulation could translate an image taken with a normal light-sensing camera into a tactile representation.
This device in the article is only pressure, but with time we will find how to interface better with nerves directly.
lastly I've seen no mention of blindness causing atrophy to the occipital lobe.
The only time blindness is directly realted to the visual cortex is when the cortex itself has either developed badly or has been damaged.
The occipital lobe is a great big region of very good nerves which you use whenever you "image"ine anything. It is not used soley to process external stimuli. It also processes internal stimuli.
I have little doubt that the blind lack imagination.
Ever seen anyone stare off into space when thinking really hard?
I've been "lost in thought" before to the point where my driving is forgotten!
¦ )
Just curious.
. . . that the frame rate on Half-Life 2 is sub-par. Maybe next revision?
it seems that not only are you a stupid fuck who does not speak english, you also do not know shit about shit. fuck you in the visual cortex.
Happy Holocaust!
L LOL
O O
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O O
LOL L
LOLOCAUST!
Happy Holocaust!
Happy Holocaust!
In the Beginning was the Command Line
Happy Holocaust!
by Neal Stephenson
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling compHappy Holocaust!uter operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That thiHappy Holocaust!s would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.
A person who went into a coma before Microsoft was founded, and woke up now, could pick up this morning's New York Times and understand everything in it--almost:
Item: the richest man in the world made his fortune from-what? Railways? Shipping? Oil? No, operating systems. Item: the Department of Justice is tackling Microsoft's supposed OS monopoly with legal tools that were invented to restrain the power of Nineteenth-Century robber barons. Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me."
What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have a future, or only a past? Here is my view, which is entirely subjective; but since I have spent a fair amount of time not only using, but programming, Macintoshes, Windows machines, Linux boxes and the BeOS, perhaps it is not so ill-informed as to be completely worthless. This is a subjective essay, more review than research paper, and so it might seem unfair or biased compared to the technical reviews you can find in PC magazines. But ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm concerned.
MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends' dads had an oHappy Holocaust!ld MGB sports car r
My thoughts exactly... you'd have "cool" colors like blue, purple, green... "warm" colors like orange, red and yellow. White could be hot, black could be ice cold.
The great thing about using temperature is it is since most objects are at whatever the ambient temp is anyway, you're not taking away from some more variable tactile sense, such as texture, if you chose to implement that somehow.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
C'mon, man. You can't have a DISPLAY for the blind. A display means you can SEE it, the blind are sightless. Conclusion? THEY CAN'T SEE IT!
It's like making a speaker for the Deaf: If you are deaf, you have NO HEARING. Thus you cannot HEAR the sounds from the speaker. Conclusion? THEY CAN'T HEAR IT.
God damn. Slashdot defies logic - news at noon!
Finally!
I've been annoyed with the programmable remote controls for some time now - that you have to look at them just to find the buttons. Put a screen like this in the wee devices and you're set. Tacit feedback - no more looking at the remote to find a button you already know where it is.
Wired had a great article on something similar a while back. It was the same principle, involving a small unit on a retainer that would "display" images to the roof of the mouth. As far as I've heard, fighter pilots also have similar systems in the backs of their flight suits allowing them to locate other crafts through tactile input (although wording like that makes it sound like it was recently banned in 11 states).
I also rememeber reading (or watching...Big Thinkers maybe) something about a audible display as well. Something that took really coarse images and "played" them from left to right. The tones produced were determined by the rise and fall of lines in the picture. It was a bit rough sounding (it certainly wasn't being developed by those leading the field in sound design), but they showed a few, and after a while you really could start to determine images based on what you heard. It was pretty cool.
k:p
This too, will end.
... Pr0n for the blind
In this whole discussion it is forgotten that most blind people are not blind from birth. They would certainly benefit from the use of 'colours' in this way.
-- Cheers!
The article is not very clear on details about the technology. Can someone tell me more about that, or point me to a scientific article in which this technology is described?
-- Cheers!
"Speakers for the deaf" is perhaps not so ridiculous as it first seems. Hearing is just the ear picking up acoustical waves in the air. Those same waves in another medium might be detected by the hands, feet, face etc. (think of the way an entire car will vibrate when the subwoofer is cranked up).
I can't see any good reason why music couldn't be experienced as a tactical sensation rather than an audial one. Don't know how aesthetically pleasing it would be though - rhythm would be easy but melody and pitch might not be so meaningful unless you have unusually sensitive skin. A device similar to the braille gizmo could amplify the vibrations of the instruments themselves and transmit them to the recipient's fingers. With practice, you might be able to compress an entire "multimedia" experience to a touchpad.
C'mon, man. You can't have a DISPLAY for the blind. A display means you can SEE it, the blind are sightless. Conclusion? THEY CAN'T SEE IT!
They could not see a graphic relief map but they could feel it. They can't see a tactile display but they can feel it, and chances are a sighted person could SEE it too.
Clearly you have eyes but they do not see.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
There is a free application for converting color graphics to tactile images at pasomkasik.org. It may also act as a http server that converts some html documents to Braile or high contrast versions. The conversion does not work with some more complicated html, but last time I checked it was somewhat usable with Wikipedia and Slashdot.
Think of todays braille devices as a display of 80 characters (some have 40 or 60). Each character consists usually of 2X4 pizo-cells (Small electrical motors driving a pin up and down). The braille-device has a few other buttons as well. Most notably small buttons above each braille character. Pressing this button will typically move the cursor to this character.
A blind person can use a computer with sound only (using TextToSpeach and Screen Readers), but braille devices are a great aid. But the braille device is a great help, and most users really depend on them to be effective.
The problem is that they are insanely expensive. Typically a 80 character Braille Display of reasonable quality will cost you $10.000 to $15.000!! This is fragile technology. Expect it to last 2-5 years!
It is very hard to reduce this cost significantly - the reason is the cost of the pizo-cells (An 80 character device has actually 640 small electrical motors).
Being able to build braille display without using pizo cells is essential for building useful computers for blind people. This looks fantastic, but is unfortunately very low on details - and costs.
Seems like lots of people don't know what a braille display is. Here is one of the top braille displays availiable. Price: $15.000:
Papenmeier EL 2D-80
You place your keyboard on the top. This particular display has a 20 character vertical list as well. That is a bit uncommon. Most have just a 40/60/80 character horisontal list.
The new technology is supposed to replace the 2X4 piezo cells that you see at the bottom of picture 2.
The researchers are German, not Spanish. The research is actually taking place in the microrobotics group at the caesar applied sciences research center in Bonn, Germany. The prize is awarded by a Spanish organization, which is why the ceremony is taking place in Spain.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Yes, english is not my natural language.
By the way, I am myself born strongly visualy impaired and went to specialized school organizations where I learnt and worked with Braille.
I lived with many friends born and who became blind by accidents, illness and macula progressive downgrades or near blind there several years.
Perhaps it is as difficult to understand what a blind can or can not picture when one man have good sight or met few blinds, as it is difficult for a compleatly blind to understand what sight realy is.
This remind me of salesmans from a compagny who went to the blind school I was in. They promoted a printer with special ink that bumped.
This printer was indeed capable of producing touchable prints but the salesmans belived and pretended this printer would enable blinds to see pictures. The facts were, no blind at the school (even the blind teachers) was able to understand printed photographs or 3D representations on the paper.
Sure, this special ink printer showed it usefullness at printing 2D sketchs and charts that blinds could easyly follow with their fingers. The school did not buy it however, because of the price and cost of running it. We had cheaper way of reproducing braille and bumped drawings with plastic thermo formed sheets. We also still use thin plastic films scratched with a punch to produce beveled drawings by hand. Cheap, simple and good for what it does and much more cheaper than using that bumpy ink printer.
By the way I see how this can choke you at the point you throw out personnal threats annonymously.
You may understand this as well over time. You may as well understand many other things as, how to reply more politely and throw your rants away.
You'r welcome.
Léa Gris
If you brush your hand over your keyboard or mousepad and close your eyes can you not construct an image?
Do you really think such an ability is only the relm of the sighted?
Certainly they with no sight will have a different image, but will it be any less nuanced?
You're using the terminology of the seeing. I'm not blind; I have no idea what goes on in their minds. But, I imagine if they've never seen with their eyes, then they wouldn't have a "picture" of the keyboard, they would have a mental map. And it would be different than how we comprehend our own mental "images" of things.
Let's think about things that you never actually see. For instance, what is your image of what a headache looks like? Assuming you've never seen a picture of it, what does a stomach look like? After all, you have one in your body, and you've certainly felt it at times in your life.
Here's a slightly more risque one: if you're a guy, ever been inside a lady? Would you be able to draw what the inside of *that* lady looked like just by how it felt? I doubt it. But I'm sure you have a mental map of it.
Or more banal: ever stuck a q-tip in your ear canal? Would you be able to draw what it looks like? Possibly not, even though you've traced its contours with the q-tip. And yes, I know no one should ever stick a q-tip in there, but everyone does it.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Thanks for the offer! but how do I contact you?
The q-tip thing, lol ;)
:) and then hold out your hand.
well, I certainly agree with you that the blind would not be "seeing" a picture - but my point is that a camera could translate images into sensations which a blind person could interpret and judge their surroundings by.
Try this - look around the room. Now close your eyes (not before you finish reading this though
Move your hand around and imagine that you can feel the room, feel the wall, the carpet, the chair. It's not a far stretch of the imagination.
This is what I am talking about, translating light into a tactile representation.
Of course, pressure is not a robust-enough sensation to translate images into a comprehensive tactile experience. Which is why I've prognosticated the eventual direct stimulation of nerves in order to communicate different feelings, like hard, soft, wet, dry, vibrating...so on and so forth.
The pallete of touch is great and varied.
Now I am not talking, either, of a "direct" translation of the image captured into a "picture" . Rather I would think that some sort of interpretation would be incorporated.
What would be most useful would be a way to communicate spacial information about the environment to a blind person - create some way with the tactile suit to inform them that there is a wall directly ahed and that they are about 10 feet from it.
Just imagine walking through your house in the middle of the night - how you hold your hands out in front of you scanning for objects.
Now imagine if you could feel out about 10 feet - 20 feet - 100 feet.
I would think this could work. Even though a blind person cannot see, or has never seen, an object they have felt that object. It's just a matter of allowing them to feel it when it is out of range of touch.
At any rate, it's complete speculation on my part, but I don't see any problems with enabling those without sight with this ability.