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New Graphic Displays for the Blind 100

Posted by samzenpus from the feels-like-you-have-mail dept.
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."
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New Graphic Displays for the Blind More

New Graphic Displays for the Blind

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  • Could this somehow work with colors/images? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:16PM (#11165145) Homepage
    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 [komar.org] is probably undoable, but what about simple stuff like a red rose?

    • Re:Could this somehow work with colors/images? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Justice8096 ( 673052 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:41PM (#11165282)
      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.
      • I don't think music can be translated that easy for a deaf to be understood - surely, you can give him an idea, but the important part of it, the emotional impact, would be difficult - if not impossible. I always thought music was the most powerful art form known to man - it's a catalyst for emotions like no other. A bad day can be better with your favorite tune, or be even worst with a wrong one. It works almost instantly. Bah, for me atleast :)

        I recall a movie with Richard Dreyfuss which touched thi
      • You could use different temperatures of the metal to transcode the color information.
        • 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.
    • Is there any way this could somehow do color/images?

      Color is a function of the human eye receptors. A person who was blind at birth would have no clue what blue, yellow, or red is. You could say the sun is yellow but that would have about as much meaning as the sun is *kikjij*. How to would one represent *kikjij* as a texture?

      Tactile senses can only really tell you shape, texture (firmness/feel), and temperature. Color can not be directly translated into feel. A first step in translating the images
    • Instead of color, you could display a grayscale image by varying the depth of each pin depending on that pixel's brightness.

      Maybe if you could let the blind user alternate the display from a "grayscale" channel to a red, blue and then green channel, the user could then try to visualize the scene in his head. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the resolution of the device, and how many varying levels of depth it can reproduce...
    • more than color this could allow a blind person virtual 360 degree vision.

      or anyone for that matter.

      If you had a camera mounted on your back it could translate the image it captures into a type of virtual mosiac. It could do this via a body-wide graphical tactile display of high resolution.

      then interpret/transfer that image to a "shirt" of this material - or a whole skinsuit.

      So this way you could actually "feel" motion behind you. Perhaps you would even get very good at it too. It is not a far stretch t
      • 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
        • 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?

          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
          • 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.
          • 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 i
            • The q-tip thing, lol ;)

              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 :) and then hold out your hand.

              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 imaginati
    • 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.

  • WHAT?!? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by deflin39 ( 769464 )
    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.

  • Why can't they just use the CLI? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by koreaman ( 835838 ) <uman@umanwizard.com> on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:22PM (#11165178)
    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?
    • 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?

      1) Brail terminals that i've seen only offer one line of text. They are already horribly expensive items. The diffrence would be using *nix mail vs mutt. Anything with cursor control doesn't work well with this or ev
      • in response to 1), I am not talking about a braille terminal. I'm talking about a text-to-speech synthesizer.
        • in response to 1), I am not talking about a braille terminal. I'm talking about a text-to-speech synthesizer.

          Well, i'm not trully familar with the modern form of text-to-speech systems used by IT professionals, only the basic ones that say "ree colin whi cant thae ucee za see el ei?". While they are helpful they can be very slow and tedius even using some old *nix utilities that don't use any form of cursor control.

          I could *learn* to do much with text-to-speech but it is NO replacement for a full screen

    • Re:Why can't they just use the CLI? (Score:4, Informative)

      by pere ( 23710 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @07:54AM (#11166879)
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by l810c ( 551591 ) * on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:23PM (#11165186)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ajlitt ( 19055 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:31PM (#11165227)
      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 (Score:4, Informative)

        by daltonlp ( 678530 ) on Thursday December 23, 2004 @12:26AM (#11165483) Homepage

        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!

      • Re:Pin thingy (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Not solenoids but piezzo crystals which fliop the pins.
        Braille displays are damned expensive. an 80-cell
        braill display can cost up to $15,000. They are
        quite reliable. The one I'm using at the moment has
        worked fine for the last 12 years. I'd be interested to know
        what the reliability of this new tech. is like. The display I used
        previously used solenoids and needed maintenance every few months.
    • I think you're thinking of Pinpressions [rainbowsymphonystore.com].

  • Interesting stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mistersooreams ( 811324 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:24PM (#11165189) Homepage

    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?

    • 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...

    • Re:Interesting stuff (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 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 a
      • If you would like a account , i'd be happy to sign you up for a account with your desired email /username/default password and read the captcha for you.
      • Blind hackers like myself use 8-dot computer braille which generally has a one-to-one mapping of ASCII to braille symbols.

        so basically what you're saying is you can read a kind of 8 bit binary?! ... respect!
      • Er, again, logged in:

        If dude above doesn't get back to you, I'll open you a /. account if you like.

        Hit me at dojothemouse@mac.com with your email address, and desired nick (and perhaps a backup or two, in case they're taken). I'll give you a starter password.

        Hrm. Maybe I'll advertise this in my sig.

  • Imagine... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...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!

  • is this the best todays technology can do? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by r4d1x ( 779518 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:30PM (#11165222)
    Why not just hook them up to the BrainPort [slashdot.org]? A step closer to helping them "see" again......
    • I'd love to get a BrainPort device and hook it up to the CPU of my PC. Every time the processor executes an instruction I'd like to have hardware decode it and stimulate a bit on the BrainPort. Every time the processor fetches from memory the BrainPort would be notified of a little bit of the data at the fetch memory address (say, 50 bytes above and below the fected address). Same with writes. After a while of using this I would expect debugging low level software problems would become a LOT faster. Ad

  • Audible Graphic Display? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by devnullkac ( 223246 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @11:40PM (#11165275) Homepage
    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.

    • Todays braille terminals actually make "snaps" as the pins are moving up and down. I havent sees Sneakers, but from what you explain it might have been the actually sound. Dont know if you should call the "snaps" a feature or a bug though.

  • Not spanish :-( (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sadly (since i am a spanish researcher) i must say that, acording to the article, the researchers are not spanish but german. That is, the spanish blind organization (ONCE) has given a prize to the german researchers that have developed that cute device. Congratulations.


    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?
    • This has been tried, and my understanding is that it's generally regarded as a failure. The device was called the opticon, and it's featured in the movie "Sneakers." I had it explained to me once by a somatosensory neurophysiologist, and he said that the piezoelectric-based ones essentially vibrated across the fingertips at the resonance frequency of the piezo crystals themselves, and they (like typical engineers) never bothered to consult the neurophysiology literature to find out what part of the freque
      • That's an interesting take on the tech. But I worked professionally with servo'd piezos about 14 years ago, and they don't need to oscillate - you can just snap them in or out at any time, and leave them there, then move them again at any time. With milliseconds in between, even varying amounts of milliseconds from a few to a few thousand, from reposition to reposition. Their resonance frequency isn't a factor. Maybe they were trying to use the resonance frequency, for lower power or something, and it faile
        • I don't know anything about the engineering aspects of it, why they would need to use the resonance frequency instead of another one. My guess is that it's a quantitative issue of getting the thing to fit into a small unit or something, but I agree, it sounded weird to me too.

          As far as Braille being a DC phenomenon, I think the idea is that there were supposed to be a small number of braille units, like one for each fingertip, and the person would keep their finger stationary while the letters scrolled ac
          • Braille is most commonly transmitted by rubbing a finger on raised dots of static, physical material like metal or paper. There's no reason why people can't rub a dynamic piezo pin grid. There's also no reason why such a grid can't be mounted on a vibrating piezo stage.
  • ... 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?
    • 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
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • . . . that the frame rate on Half-Life 2 is sub-par. Maybe next revision?

  • Wired had a great article [wired.com] 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 disp

  • ... Pr0n for the blind
  • 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?
  • 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 d
  • 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 [papenmeier.de]

    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 [caesar.de] at the caesar [caesar.de] 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.

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