Reading in the dark - Further adventures of a human test subject
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11:53 am
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Further adventures of a human test subject
Yesterday I met with a Media Lab grad student who is designing and testing a wearable haptic braille display. The device is strapped to your arm, and what it does is locate objects in your environment then produces vibrations which indicate braille letters/words identifying these objects.
The device is pretty nifty, though I spent a while getting used to figuring out where I was feeling the vibration on my forearm. The mental process of feeling a vibration (cell phone motors are used for this, and it is interesting that the same motor produces a different tone on different parts of your wrist/forearm/elbow). At one point I looked down at this device sprouting wires and Radio Shack parts velcroed to my arm and, grinning like a maniac, commented that I kept expecting sparks to fly from it and make it look pretty scarey. David replied that I did look kind of scarey actually (I was wearing my black Shakespeare's tomb tshirt, a black Dark Knight baseball cap, black jeans and black Keds, so I think the prosthetic on my arm accessorized nicely).
David is looking for more braille readers to test the device (I was "Data point Number 2"); you can email him at dsach@mit.edu
and you can read more about his work here
http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/pubs/papers/2005-04-aybspots.pdf .
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