[accessibleimage] Re: Haptic rendering of images

Thank you, Will.

> So, I'd be interested in hearing about any problems you've
> found users have encountered with using serialised images.

Well, this has not been exhaustively investigated, but the
impression that I and one of the blind beta-testers had was
that somehow it seemed very difficult to mentally integrate
the tactile feedback from a manual scan with a single point
of tactile contact. I suppose it was analogous to someone
creating a cardboard raised drawing for you and then asking
you to try and figure out its content by scraping it with
a match or a needle instead of using multiple fingers at the
same time to feel overall shapes and textures and such. If
you find a way to make the single-point-of-contact devices
give more intuitive feedback, I'd be very interested. Like I
wrote, I played with friction, vibration and gradient based
force feedback settings, but overall I did not find the results
encouraging. It was meant to provide supplementary information
for the soundscapes under direct user control (after all, you
cannot wiggle your ears in a functionally relevant way to hear
out any details), but so far I was a bit disappointed with the
multimodal experiment. The final show-stopper was that most
of the tactile gaming peripherals disappeared from the market.

I played with a Phantom stylus from Sensable once when I was
at the NASA booth at SIGGRAPH in 1998 in Orlando, and that
was quite cool and intuitive, e.g. for 3D sculpting work,
but at that time it had a $25,000 price tag if I remember
correctly. One key functional difference here was that one
had not only force feedback for lateral movements, but also
for movements perpendicular to the surface.

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com


Will Pearson wrote: 
Hi Peter,

"However, having only a single point (pixel) of contact can be
a bit counter-intuitive with complex images, and I chose not
to pursue this further until more versatile haptic devices
would become available (and affordable)."

Yes, only having a single surface contact point is something that's
concerned me too. Serial pattern recognition is something I hope to
investigate in-depth in the future, as I have a good hypothesis on how
pattern recognition is performed with serial output, however it's going to
be at least a few months until I can get around to it, and that's if I don't
work on another aspect of haptics first. So, I'd be interested in hearing
about any problems you've found users have encountered with using serialised
images.

Thanks,

Will


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