Catherine and listers,
I will start by echoing a strong warning about getting your hopes up
for a new Optacon 3 product anytime soon, and I encourage you to be
extremely suspicious about anyone asking for money to fund new
Optacon research.
With that said, I hasten to point out that Charles Pond's recent
messages to this list were not asking for money, although he did
state that he needed $10,000 to $13,000 in order to finish his new
Optacon display development. Clearly, that relatively small sum of
funding would not come anywhere near the many hundreds of thousands
of dollars needed to develop the rest of an Optacon 3 device,
assuming the tactile display development portion was successful and
working well.
I also encourage us all to be extremely careful when making and
sharing assumptions or suspicions about the poor health or death of
individuals. Does anyone on this list have any actual proof that
Charles Pond is truly deceased, or do we only have unsupported
assumptions and irresponsible gossip?
In two of his recent posts to this Optacon list, Charles Pond
mentioned being his brother and writing for Charles. These appeared
to me to be the kind of ill advised humor one might expect from
someone who has been falsely proclaimed to be deceased.
In the last several months, I have had two direct Email exchanges
with Charles, and they both were very consistent with his former
writing style and technical issues. He mentioned Halbach magnetic
arrays, a technical term for a special kind of magnet I told him
about several years ago. I am sure that a poser would not have known
to use such a unique technical reference in Optacon discussions with me.
Certainly, I am comfortably convinced that Charles Pond, the one
we've heard from in the past, is still alive and has recovered enough
from his severe health problems to be able to continue some
discussions about Optacon tactile displays.
However, I am also convinced that we have not had independent
observation of and confirmation of any working prototypes of
Charles's Optacon 3 tactile array devices, something that causes most
experts in the field to have serious doubts about its performance and
viability.
To be taken seriously by researchers in the tactile display field,
Charles Pond will need to be more open and willing to share details
of his design concepts and any prototypes.
Sincerely,
Noel
-
Noel H. Runyan
Phone: 1-408-866-7564
Email: Noel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-
At 11:35 PM 7/23/2020, Catherine Thomas wrote:
I think someone is having a joke at the list's expense. I doubt vey
seriously that the messages are authentically from Charles. The english is
wrong, the writing style does not match and the tone is wrong. If anyone
receives any private requests for funds claiming to be from Charles, just
delete them. This is only my opinion based on years of reading Charles'
messages.
Catherine
------------------------------------------------------
-Catherine Thomas
braille@xxxxxxxxx /
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