HaptX

Thanks to Markku Hakkanen for giving me the opportunity to experience the HaptX gloves. While Mark mentions the use of these gloves for Braille, in my mind, I was thinking of much broader application for this kind of tactile feedback.

I just wrote this post about how useful I found the ability to explore the old town of Salzburg with the tactile model installed in the city center.
these gloves have the potential to provide all sorts of tactile explorations for people with no or low vision.
Imagine being able to explore the pyramids or the Prague castle or the himalayas in tactile 3D or the solar flares observed during the recent solar eclipse. Those experiences are very hard to convey in a description or as a braille 2D tactile diagram.
The virtual nature of the model also allows me to zoom in and out to either explore the overall structure or the intricate details.
Finally, this was not limited to a static image but was representing a video stream in tactile 3D for me, which is a very powerful concept. Although it was hard because I can only touch one part of the moving image at a time but the feel of rain drops or the footsteps of a little fox on my hands or the field of sunflowers swaying the breeze was not an experience I could have found in any other tactile format.
Physical 3D tactile models would understandably be complex and expensive to produce. These gloves will allow that to scale to almost any image captured in 3D detail.
There is still a lot of work to be done to make these gloves be smaller, provide feedback that allows me to follow contours , or more affordable and to have more content available for exploration. The technology is very promising and I am excited to see where it goes. I hope it is developed closely in consultation with the blind community to ensure it will work well for us.