[Tactile-Talk] Optacon

Mon Sep 23 19:15:36 UTC 2024

I have read this before, and I partly agree but we have moved beyond this now.  In a time when I use AI to write music songs on suno.ai and udio.com.   When I use ChatGPT to read printed material. And create pictures out of descriptions and get the reverse.  When the meta glasses read printed material and are just getting started now partnering with blind AI companies as well as companies like Aira. When we have things like Seeing AI and Lookout that will soon be attached to glasses.  When I can use my AI glasses to read the computer screen or in the future send what I see to a braille display.  Your speed will be so much faster if you use Audio and just a little slower using the new larger tactile displays as the 65 + companies working on them slowly getting them attached to AI and the computers of today.  

I don’t think the Optacom as cool as it was, can keep up with the speed of the AI today.  The displays that are being made today are already starting to do things that the Opticom could not do.  For example, the Optacon was great at reading text, but it was not great at giving you an overview of large data sets.  It was not great at showing you an overall picture.  The tactile displays of today turn a blind person into a low vision person that can see in almost the same way a sighted person can see.  Whereas the optacon forced you to put each little piece of a picture together   If you were a coder with an Optican and wanted to see the Conway’s game of life develop as you wrote it in class.  You could not you could try to find parts of it on the screen, but you couldn’t find all the things you need to. With the tactile displays you can.  Scatter plots were still looking at small portions of each scatter plot with the optacon till you finally got it all in your mind and then you could decide if the data was trending one or the other way.  With displays of today you drop your hand on it, and you instantly know the data is trending to the positive or negative.  Try to look at something like a heat map with an optacon it fails because of the shear amount of color and data you must take in.  Put that on a display today and you can understand it in the same way a sighted person can.  Look at a full slide of something on a microscope with the optacon.  You can’t you have to gather the information and figure out what you’re looking at. On displays of today you can see the over all picture and zoom in and out.  

The optacon was great for text and even pictures of written or printed text but using it with dynamic materials is just to slow and as programs and data go more electronic it is just not what is needed.  IN fact, my wife and I realized she was going to have trouble getting documents for something she is doing to prove she lives in this house.  That is because we get all our mail electronically.  I don’t think I have received a bill in the mail for years. Kids under 40 live in an electronic world.  The Optacon was designed for a paper world.

You can now see formatting as the document is laid out rather than just the little area you can feel with the Optacon .    If an Optacon like device is ever made it would be better to make it with some of the electro polymers as a pair of gloves that will mimic a full-size table display all in a set of gloves.  Single point input is nothing like being able to spread your hands across the tactile displays of now. and feel all the points of a picture like a solar eclipse moving.  Settling for something like an Opticom today is just settling for old and less.  While taking what the Optacon and these tactile displays do well and advancing the technology is the direction money should be put into.  There are too many future style designs that engineers don’t have money to complete to turn back the clock and spend money on the past.  

From: Tactile-Talk <tactile-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Keith Shaw via Tactile-Talk
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2024 8:51 AM
To: Tactile Talk for the discussion of the display and use of graphics on refreshable Braille platforms <tactile-talk at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Keith Shaw <knshaw100 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Tactile-Talk] Optacon

Chad,

You wrote:

> ..strangely it [new Optacon] would be difficult, even in our modern era to duplicate this highly unique machine.

The camera and image processing (hardware and software) could probably be implemented with a well defined development project. But the real difficulty is the matching high speed, with high resolution, tactile display. Is this how you understand the situation?

In the meantime, here is an interesting perspective involving the Optacon:

'The Reading Machine That Hasn't Been Built Yet'

Harvey Lauer  March 2003

 https://www.afb.org/aw/4/2/14857

Best,

Keith

On Fri, Sep 20, 2024 at 2:22 PM Chad Allen via Tactile-Talk <tactile-talk at nfbnet.org <mailto:tactile-talk at nfbnet.org> > wrote:

The new Optacon was actually my project. Noel was providing his amazing insight to help me along. I have all the pieces in place to make it happen. I just need funding. That's what stopped the project in its tracks.

I have the plans, the team, and legally the ability to do it, but sadly, money is often the barrier to entry. 

I also strongly believe Optacon has advantages that the other graphic displays don't, but it needs to be modernized. Noel was an open book and told me everything he knew about its development that I could understand, and strangely it would be difficult, even in our modern era to duplicate this highly unique machine. If there are angel investors out there that wish to discuss this with me further, I'm happy to share my story with the Optacon. 

My best, 

Chad 

As seen on Penn and Teller: Fool Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCcA5gR0DSI

On Sep 20, 2024, at 10:58, dan.tevelde--- via Tactile-Talk <tactile-talk at nfbnet.org <mailto:tactile-talk at nfbnet.org> > wrote:

I’m changing the subject line to reflect Chad’s message and his mentioning of an optacon. Welcome Chad to the list. I recently got a an optacon but need to re-learn how to use it. I wish there was a new optacon which would take advantage of today’s technology. I’ve run into situations where I needed to know the print equivalent of a Braille symbol. I was talking with a sighted person who kept inconsistently using the terms bracket and brace. He described what they looked like visually but that didn’t mean anything to me. The emerging graphics displays are beyond my budget. I’m subscribed to an optacon list where we have occasionally talked about developing a new optacon. Unfortunately, the person driving the project just died. His name was Noel Runyan. Another reason an optacon would be helpful is when the primary and secondary relationships in a table change. If I run into a situation like that when I scan something with a phone, VoiceOver incorrectly reads the data because the hierarchy has changed. It will read the left column before reading the right column. With an optacon, a person could manually pan a camera and read data in whatever order they wanted. When one of the main developers of the optacon, James Bliss was still alive, I wrote him an extensive proposal of how I thought a new optacon could work.

Dan

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