BlindAid, a new device developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Touch Lab, enables visually impaired users to “feel” their way around a virtual model of a room or building, making it possible to familiarize themselves with the layout before going someplace new. Touch Lab director Mandayam Srinivasan is working with the Carroll Center for the Blind to develop and test the device. Preliminary results show that when blind people have the chance to explore a virtual model of a room, they have an easier time navigating their way around the actual room in real life. Carroll Center mobility instructor Joseph Kolb says BlindAid could be invaluable to the visually impaired. He notes that one of the toughest challenges is entering an unfamiliar environment without the assistance of a guide dog or another human. BlindAid uses a robotic arm that a user grasps as if holding a stylus. The stylus can create the sensation of touch by exerting a small, precisely controlled force on the user’s fingers. The BlindAid stylus functions like a blind person’s cane, enabling users to feel virtual walls, floors, doors, and objects. The stylus is connected to a computer containing a three-dimensional map of an environment. Whenever a virtual obstacle is encountered, the stylus produces a force against the user, mimicking the feel the real object would have. BlindAid could eventually be used to plan trips by public transportation using virtual route maps that users can download and interact with through touch.

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A study by Christian Holz and Patrick Baudisch at Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute suggests that the real reason for missed targets on touch screens may be finger orientation and variation between users, not the fact that users’ fingers are too big. Holz and Baudisch asked 12 volunteers to repeatedly touch a target on a touch screen, but to do so with their finger held at a specific angle, defined by the three-dimensional axes of pitch, roll, and yaw. The researchers found that the touch screen registered distinct clusters of touch points for different finger orientations, with some of the clusters only being 2 to 3 millimeters in size. Most touch-screen targets are a minimum of 10 millimeters due to the belief that a finger cannot hit a smaller target. The researchers say that if a touch-screen device knows the orientation of the finger as it touches the screen, it should be possible to define significantly smaller targets on screen. In a second study in which a series of cameras captured the position of a user’s finger, the researchers enabled the system to account for finger position, which tripled the precision of touch interaction. Fingerprints can reveal finger orientation, so the researchers adapted a type of fingerprint scanner to see if a system could identify finger position without the use of cameras. The system finds the center of a fingerprint for each touch on screen, and compares that print to a database to calculate the finger’s orientation. Applying the cluster region associated with a specific finger orientation gave the system twice the accuracy of the traditional touch technology, Baudisch says.

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