Questions answered inline below. Ron -----Original Message----- From: FreeLists Mailing List Manager [mailto:ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 05/07/2011 1:09 AM To: optacon-l digest users Subject: optacon-l Digest V8 #15 optacon-l Digest Fri, 06 May 2011 Volume: 08 Issue: 015 In This Issue: [optacon-l] Questions about tactile displays and assistive d ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 05:53:37 -0400 From: Seth Teller <teller@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: [optacon-l] Questions about tactile displays and assistive devices for Hello Optacon list members, My lab at MIT develops assistive technology. For some years we have worked with people with MS to develop robotic assistants. We have started to collaborate with blind people to develop a wearable device that will sense the wearer's surround (using color or depth cameras), interpret the sensor data (as obstacles, objects, hazards, text, people etc. or their attributes) and relay the interpreted data to the wearer via one or more channels (speech, spatialized sound, braille, or tactile display), using whatever channel(s) are appropriate to the current task, user context, and user preferences. We realize that it is critical to involve users in research from the very start, in order to understand their needs and increase the chance that any solutions we come up will actually be useful and used. Since this group includes many Optacon users, I'm writing to ask about your real-world experiences with tactile displays and your desires for assistive technology in general. (As background I found Harvey Lauer's 2003 essay on "The Reading Machine That Hasn't Been Built Yet," linked at http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw040204, quite powerful.) Anyway, here are a few questions to start: 1. People use the Optacon to read text, math symbols and engineering plots. For what sort of other pictorial representations do you use the device? How well does this work for you? Where or how does it fail? A: I used my optacon during my career as a systems analyst to look at flow charts and also used it to proof the actual formatting or appearance of printed spreadsheets & documents. I also used it to look at incoming snail mail and various bank / brokerage statements. 2. The psychophysics literature cites spatial resolutions as fine as 40 microns (25 dots per millimeter) on the fingertips, but the spacing on the Optacon is much coarser than that. What spatial resolution do you want or need? A: I did reasonably well with the optacon's resolution. I don't know if a more granular pattern would be detectable or not. 3. Can you imagine other methods beside vibration (e.g., variation in pin height) that would effectively convey information over an area? A: Changing the frequency (pitch) of the vibration might provide some interesting variations, possibly in the analysis of color. 4. Several blind people have asked us to develop a larger surface, perhaps the size of a smartphone or even an iPad, which could be felt with 4 or 8 (non-thumb) fingers simultaneously in order to "explore" the user's surround. If you had a larger device and wanted to use it in a mobile context, where would you place it on your body? On one of your forearms, to be felt with the other hand? On one hip? What about making small, light finger pads or a glove to keep a small part of the display surface in contact with each finger regardless of how your hands move? This would get in the way of direct touch sensing of other things (though in the long run, perhaps we could make the tactile array a kind of "pass-through" device). What do you think of these ideas? A: All those sound like good possibilities. The forearm seems quite accessible and easy to deal with physically. 5. In the long run, our goal is to support many activities in the home and out in the world: navigation, object finding, text-spotting and reading (e.g. from signs at a distance), people detection, reporting facial expressions, shopping, taxi hailing, etc. It's a much longer conversation, but: what are the capabilities you would want from such a device? A: Your suggestions are fairly comprehensive and ally with my ideas. Best, Seth Teller Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT Stata Center Room 32-333 32 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139 Email: teller@xxxxxxx Phone: 617-258-7885 http://people.csail.mit.edu/teller ------------------------------ End of optacon-l Digest V8 #15 ****************************** to view the list archives, go to: www.freelists.org/archives/optacon-l To unsubscribe at any time, just send a message to: optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in the message subject. Tell your friends about the list. They can subscribe by sending a message to: optacon-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "subscribe" (without the quotes) in the message subject.