A Cheap, Portable Haptic Device for Relaying 2-D Graphical Information to Individuals who are Visually Impaired

David Burch and Dianne Pawluk

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

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Summary

A single-finger, point contact haptic device is presented that is capable of rendering color from a visual graphic as different vibratory signals to simulate textures on a tactile graphic. The idea was to create a device that is capable of using color/texture as a method of parsing objects into parts and to relay their 3-D orientation, the two primary deficiencies of raised line drawings. For this, the device has two main components, an RGB color sensor and piezoelectric actuator, mounted in a casing that is wrapped around the finger. The resulting device has a spatial sensitivity (<2mm) comparable to natural touch (1.0mm) and can be used to output a variety of textures (with a usable frequency bandwidth of 1 to 200 Hz). The design can easily be expanded for a point-contact device with contacts on multiple fingers, while remaining affordable (<$100) and portable (<500g).

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