Cool product!

Seppo sent me a link to this product today:

The braille screen works with electromagnetic or piezoelectric principles. When the current or voltage goes through every array of six stitches, the resulting rise and decline gives birth to braille. The product scans the original printed matter, then translates the images into analog electrical signals with an optical-to-electrical transducer. Finally, it translates the analog electrical signal into a digital signal.

That’s so rad!

My MIT senior thesis was on a “refreshable Braille multi-line display for the blind” — sort of a computer screen for electronic content that displayed in Braille. It was also a piezoelectric based system.

The big challenge with Braille systems at the time was that it was both costly and challenging to create a consumer-priced electronic display that displayed more than one line at a time. Having more than one line is really important for the ability to scan text rapidly to find what you are looking for, which experienced Braille readers can do as easiler as seeing people can with written text. However, most refreshable display systems generally only show a line or two, because the parts are expensive. With a scanning mechanism like this, I am not sure if it can do what we hoped to do with full-page displays, but this is an awesome product nonetheless. I wonder how much it goes for.

There are a lot of cool gadgets for people who could use them, but a barrier is cost. When creating products like this, is particularly important to keep the prices down, down, down.