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."

Comments

Could this somehow work with colors/images?

[xmas2003]

Is there any way this could somehow do color/images? I read the story (yea, even though this is /.) and I think the writeup could have been more clear that I think (?) all this is doing is rendering text into Braile (the title of the story made me think it did more) ... but what about colors/images? I don't know what people blind since birth can "visualize", but for those folks who have had vision, could this be used as some approach to see colors?

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?

Re:Could this somehow work with colors/images?

[Justice8096]

I'm not sure that the impact of color could be interpreted easily with texture. Consider what it would be like if you tried to explain music to the deaf - The lyrics (if they exist) can be translated, the beat pattern and rhythm can be translated, but translating major, minor, augmented and diminished 7ths alone would fall short. Mathematically I can talk about ratios of 12th roots of 2, and poetically I can talk about "wholeness" and "loneliness" - but adding them all up would take a genius, if the person didn't have the experience of hearing (or, to put it another way, some of the interpretation is hardware-based).
Now, I can try to translate color into music, but that fails due to its dimensional nature - imagine trying to explain a theme with variations, where each different variation is played by a different player with spatial seperation - there aren't good enough words, and for the tone-deaf, it would still be useless.

Why can't they just use the CLI?

[koreaman]

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?

Re:Why can't they just use the CLI?

[pere]

This is for use with CLI. As are todays braille displays.

Lots of fancy technology have tried to use tactile feedback for something useful for blind, but they have failed. The only useful tactile devise is really a braille display, and it displays single characters usually by moving 2X4 pieco-cells/pins up and down.

If you want to display a graphical interface, you really just map it down to one line of text (the line were your cursor is) - basically a CLI, and display it on an 80 character braille display.

Most other info (position, color, font-size etc) you either just discard, or display as sound.

Pin thingy

[l810c]

This kind of reminds me of a toy I've seen at Spencers and other novelty stores.

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.

Re:Pin thingy

[ajlitt]

What's novel about this approach is that it is mechanically simpler and potentially cheaper to manufacture than current Braille readouts (which, as far as I can tell use many small solenoids). Also, since the display elements are bistable (that is, requires power only to switch up/down states, but not to maintain them) power consumption is minimal and portable PDA-like devices would become smaller and more practical.

Re:Pin thingy

[daltonlp]

Current braille displays use piezoelectric pins, not solenoids (pagers also use piezoelectric wafers to vibrate).

Piezoelectric pins are low-power, but also brittle. You can't get very good resolution because if you make them too tiny, they break. They also tend to have short lifetimes.

Solenoids are even bulkier, and draw more power, making them even less practical than piezo pins. Solenoids are good when you need a lot of punching power (which is why they're used for dot-matrix printer heads). They're overkill when you just want something a blind person can sense.

In 1999, two other Electrical Engineering students and I built something like this for our student design project. It used (guess what) shape memory alloys. It connected directly to the VGA output of a PC and averaged the color inputs to judge whether pixels should be raised or lowered.

It was only 8x8 pixels (just a prototype), but it was pretty awesome to move the mouse around and see those pins "do the wave".

The only drawback was the amount of heat it generated. Shape memory alloys change shape *because* of temperature difference (the change in temperature is not a side effect).

Even with a bunch of CPU fans cooling it, we were afraid our device would melt if we left it on for more than a few minutes.

It appears these folks have solved the heat/power problem with a design that requires power only when changing state. Nice work!

Interesting stuff

[mistersooreams]

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?

Re:Interesting stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, standard braille uses a 6-dot matrix which will represent 63 different symbols.
So, in grade I braille there is a one-to-one mapping for letters and punctuation
but for numbers the letters a thru i represent 1 to 9, j represents 0; but numbers are preceedded by a reserved "number sign" pattern to
disambiguate. In grade II braille, things are a lot more compled. You have "contractions" where a single cell is used to represent frequently-used letter combinations like (sh) or (ch).
These contractions can also be position specific, e.g. one particular symbol represents "dis" at the beginning of a word, "dd" in the middle of a word, and "full-stop" at the end of a word.
You have single or multi-letter abbreviations, e.g. "p" on its own represents "people", "nec" represents "necessary". The rules go on and on.
However, this complexity has nothing to do with the hardware. It's handled in by software whenever grade I or grade II output is needed.
Blind hackers like myself use 8-dot computer braille which generally has a one-to-one mapping of ASCII to braille symbols.
(and I'm only posting as AC because big fat lazy Cowboy Neal is too big fat and lazy to get up off his big fat lazy arse and answer my e-mails asking for help setting up a Slashdot account. I can't do it myself because I can't read the captcha. (maybe if I had one of these new hi-res thingies capable of rendering the shape of it ... what's this goatse thing about anyway?

is this the best todays technology can do?

[r4d1x]

Why not just hook them up to the BrainPort? A step closer to helping them "see" again......

Audible Graphic Display?

[devnullkac]

bimetal snap plates

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.