Towards low-cost devices that translate visual graphics into tactile graphics

What is it about?

Digital content plays a crucial role on work, study and leisure activities performed by many people around the world. But, under limitations imposed by our current technological context, the consumption of such contents currently rely almost exclusively on two human senses: the visual and the auditory senses. Relying on olfactory, gustatory or tactile senses to convey any complex information tend to demand very expensive devices that are not widely available to the market. This paper presents a novel approach towards the creation of affordable technologies that pave the way for the transmission of digital content relying on our tactile sense.

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Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The existing technologies used to translate digital content into tactile graphics tend to contain thousands of expensive structures called "actuators". The amount of actuators is typically large because devices that use few actuators tend to be unacceptably slow. Our findings show that our novel approach can enable the construction of devices that can cut more than 90% of the actuators used by expensive devices and still achieve the same top speed as those devices. Thus our approach has the potential to create devices that are both fast and low-cost.

Perspectives