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Display of virtual braille dots by lateral skin deformation: feasibility study

Published: 01 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

When a progressive wave of localized deformations occurs tangentially on the fingerpad skin, one typically experiences the illusion of a small object sliding on it. This effect was investigated because of its potential application to the display of Braille. A device was constructed that could produce such deformation patterns along a line. Blind subjects' ability to read truncated Braille characters (‘○○’, ‘○•’, ‘•○’, and ‘••’) using the device was experimentally tested and compared to their performance with a conventional Braille medium. While subjects could identify two-character strings with a high rate of success, several factors need to be addressed before a display based on this principle can become practical.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 2, Issue 2
April 2005
112 pages
ISSN:1544-3558
EISSN:1544-3965
DOI:10.1145/1060581
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 April 2005
Published in TAP Volume 2, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Braille display
  2. lateral skin deformation
  3. tactile perception

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