We are back with another interview from the CSUNATC24 Exhibit Hall floor. Only one more to go after this one. Take your bets now as to who holds the last interview slot. And no, just because a robot makes a surprise appearance, the last interview is not with eBot thankfully.
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CSUNATC24 Interview: Alex Russomanno and Sile O,Modhrain of Newhaptics
We have been covering the exciting world of Multiline Braille Displays for a long time. And we are moving ever closer from fantasy to reality as the EBRF standard emerges onto the scene. As a result of so many placing effort into this space, we are now starting to see some new Braille technologies arise to provide a new kind of tactile feel to the need for a new style of display. JJ caught up with CEO Alex Russomanno and Sile O'Modhrain, CXO or Chief Experience Officer, of Newhaptics
To talk about their Braille bubbles approach to the multiline display. That is to say, J.J. found out how compressed air can be used to drive pins on a display rather than him using a wand to wave bubbles around in the air. Listen in, or read the transcript, to learn how this new 3 line 24 cell display has been 12 years in the making. And why this technology earned a National science foundation grant for a display that allows multitouch with its multiline Braille implementation. The unit is in pre-production now, however, to stay up to date with a possible product release next year, visit the official Newhaptics Website
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptJoe Steinkamp: Hi and welcome everyone to episode, 2 hundred and, wait what is it again help me out Patrick 228 of the Blind Bargains Cast. Hi, I'm Joe Steinkamp, and I'm here with my pal J J, Where's J? JJ? Gigi? JG, JG Thirlwell, ooo JG Thirlwell, is here Martok, one of the greatest Klingons. Oh man, I am so excited. Deep Space Nine must be missing... Wait, no, not him either. Rats. I mistook this big pile of pizza boxes as JG Thirlwell. How could I do? Where did we get all these pizza boxes so soon? We haven't even been here. And I've got to get a broom to get those cobwebs down from these corners. Wow. This is a rusty, dusty place that I need to clean. Make a note here and must clean studio or find someone who can. Save. Got it. There. Now that that's out of the way, I can tell you that we've got our penultimate interview from CSUN 2024. J.J. has an opportunity to sit down and talk to somebody from the exhibit hall floor. Next week, we've got our last interview. Who could that possibly be? Do you have any ideas? If you do, send them in to feedback@blindbargains.com. We would love to hear your thoughts and your predictions on who our final interview could possibly be. Now, J.J. and I have talked about assistive technology for a long time, 14 years, give or take a few, and we've talked about all sorts of crazy technologies. I mean, we've talked about things you wear, that's going to help you with your mobility. We've talked about all sorts of wild robotics and we've talked about, oh, I don't know. Things that were going to be amazing in the future. You know, it sounds like science fiction, but it isn't. We're actually starting to see a lot of movement in the EBRF and multiline braille display space. And we're going to hear today about a company out of Michigan, because of course, if it's in Michigan, J would know about it, but we're going to hear today about a company out of Michigan that's got a really neat way of doing braille with bubbles. To be honest, the first time I heard about bubbles and J.J., I just thought it was like him standing in the exhibit hall with like a wand and a trail of bubbles behind him. Then I found out that it wasn't that, and as cool as that might be, this is even better as we're going to learn about how air bubbles could be a future way for you to read braille. Before we do that, I want to tell you that these interviews that you've been hearing from CSUN have been done on Zoom recorders. In fact, over the years, most of our recordings have been done on Zoom recorders. Almost all of the ones I've done for the last too long of a period of time from CSUN have been on Zoom recorders, but those Zoom recorders in the past, garbage, you know why? Because they didn't talk. These new Zoom recorders, they have spoken prompts on them and it makes it so much easier to know when I've screwed up. I mean like screwed up a recording, not screwed up during a recording. That's pretty obvious. Patrick's pretty good at reminding us all about that, but these new Zoom recorders allow us to be able to hear what we're about to record and do certain things while on the device. Here's Jay to tell you more about it
J.J. Meddaugh: Many of our podcast interviews are being recorded using new accessible voice recorders from Zoom. Zoom has released three new Essential voice recorders, the H1, H4, and H6Essential, all providing unparalleled audio quality and accessible features like a voice guide that helps you know what menu option you are on when you're moving through the menus. They're available now at ATGuys.com, ranging from the simple but powerful H1Essential for $99 up to the H6Essential for $299, which has the capability of recording up to six tracks at once. We love them. I used them for our podcast out in CSUN in Anaheim in 2024, and we think you will as well. Again, you can go to ATGuys.com to learn more about the Zoom accessible voice recorders or call 269-216-4798.
[interview sounder]
JM: CSUN 2024, sitting in the side of the Exhibit Hall, I'm here with Alex Russomanno, CEO, and Sile O'Modhrain, CXO of NewHaptics, a Michigan-based company, proud to say that, and developers of a new Braille display technology. I'll let you both tell me about it, but welcome to the podcast.
Alex Russomanno,CEO,: Thanks for having us.
Sile O'Modhrain: Appreciate it.
JM: You probably can figure out whose voice is who's there from listening. I guess I'll just start with you, Alex. Tell me a little bit about NewHaptics. You both just cut each other off and do whatever you want, but tell us a little bit about the display and what you're showing. Yeah,
AR: I can tell a little bit about the origin story. We're a startup company based in Ann Arbor. We spun out of the University of Michigan back in, I think, 2018, officially. But the company and its kind of inception goes all the way back to my PhD, which I did at the University of Michigan, where Sile was one of my co-advisors, and our other co-founder, Brent Gillespie, who's not here with us today, he was my advisor. In my time there, we developed a brand new technology that could be used for refreshable Braille. Spent many years perfecting it and trying to get it to a good place, and finally, in the last couple of years, we've been able to really start to pull together a device that we're feeling really good about sharing. That's probably what you felt today and have had a chance to feel so far.
JM: Sure. And we'll talk about that in just a second. But what got you in specifically to Braille technology? Was it something at the university that you experienced, or
AR: Sile will definitely be the one to talk more about this, but I mean, interestingly, I came at it originally from a technical side. So when I first got to the university, I was kind of very curious and trying to figure out what I wanted to specialize in. And this project was just one thing that came up, and I was, of course, super interested in the application and just the potential for it. And so I really came at it from the technical side, and then, of course, fell in love with the application space and really the idea in general. And so a lot of that stems from just Sile's passion for it and just getting to know more and more about the blind community.
JM: I can definitely hear the passion. So Sile, you're a professor at U of M.
SO: Yes, a joint appointment. I teach in the Performing Arts Technology program in the School of Music, but I also work in the School of Information. So kind of crossing those two areas. And I suppose my passion, as Alex said, comes from the fact that I'm visually impaired myself and use Braille, but I also want to access information that's not very easy to speak. So things like waveforms for sound editing or graphics for working with statistics or all sorts of things that all of us have had experience trying to deal with using screen readers but are much better suited to sort of spatial display using a tactile display or something like that. So that's really where I came from.
JM: So as a professor, did you reach out to students to say, I have an idea for a project, or how did this get going on your end?
SO: So it was myself and Brent Gillespie, Professor Gillespie. We had worked together when we were both at Stanford, and actually, we had worked together on a haptic display, so a different kind of feel-based display for doing waveform editing and also just making Microsoft Windows so that you could actually feel the objects on the screen. Now, it's not the same technology that we're doing now, but we'd worked together all that way back, and we still had this idea that there was a better way to do this. And so when I moved to Michigan, Brent was already here, we put in a National Science Foundation grant to develop this idea of bubbles driving dots, if we could, because Brent had some related project where he'd tried this out for another application, and we were like, this should work for Braille. And so that's where we got started, and we eventually got that project funded, and that's what funded Alex's PhD.
JM: Very cool. So that's the culmination of that, is what you're showing here today. So what are we showing here?
AR: Culmination to, what is that, 12 years in the making, or
SO: something like that, a lifetime.
JM: It's still in development. It's still in development, too, so maybe not even the culmination yet.
AR: It took a while. I mean, obviously, I did my PhD focused on the technology, and then what we have here today is a, well, yeah, I mean, very particularly, we have a three-line by 24-cell, multi-line Braille display, and it's working in a box on the table right beside me here.
JM: Showing real Braille.
AR: Yes, exactly. And I think we've gotten some really encouraging feedback from people even saying that it feels just like the piezos, and so that's just really reassuring. It's taken quite a long time to get there, and the Braille is the core of what we're trying to do, and it's the most important part, and once we've gotten to that point as of late, we've had a lot of fun now dipping into just a lot of the interesting things that Sile's really passionate about of the user experience side of things and trying to figure out now that we have a multi-line display, how can we make it useful? How can we bring it to users and improve their experience in using Braille.
JM: So as you've been going along with the project, what are you learning about and what is making this display different than others? Because there's a lot of these that are popping up. You're across the hall from one of them.
AR: Of course
JM: That's some great booth planning there from CSUN, but there's a lot of different displays out there, so you're going to have to differentiate yourself for a very limited market. So what do you see as some of your advantages?
AR: Go for it, Sile.
SO: I think for me it's the fact that we've integrated a touch display for gesture recognition, things like double tap, with the Braille display, so it's all there under your finger if you like, and that means that instead of having to worry about routing a cursor, you just double tap where you want the cursor to come to, so that takes all of the complexity out of that, and it allows, eventually we'll be able to do a more complex set of gestures for scrolling and zooming and doing all the kinds of things that you can do on an iPhone, but bringing them to a Braille display, so you really have a sort of touch in, touch out experience that's hopefully much less complicated than things which have to use buttons to allow you to find things or go places on the display.
JM: That's an intriguing idea, right, because your current setup, if you have an iPhone and then you're Bluetooth to a Braille display, you're using the Braille display with one line for one thing, and then a whole bunch of commands that some people are really good at memorizing, but not everyone is, and there's tons of them, and being able to transpose some of that over to, hey, I can just have my hands on one thing, you might not have every single iPhone command, but you can have the basic interaction in one device, right?
SO: Yeah, and even just editing, like just, oh, I made a mistake here, and double tapping where here is, and the cursor comes to you, and you can just fix it.
JM: I feel like you need the Braille gesture, the scrub gesture, but for erasing, so you don't, like, we take your finger and you try to...
SO: Absolutely, we totally do, like you used to do on an old Perkins when you tried to get rid of the dots out of it.
AR: smush them down.
SO: Yeah.
JM: Smush it.
SO: But the other thing that excites me is that, you know, Braille is used for a lot of codes that don't fit on one line, like math and music and all sorts of scientific codes, and when you can actually write those out and lay them out properly in space like they need to be laid out, like you would do if you were Brailling them using a Perkins, that's the kind of thing we need with a display like this, a multi-line display that allows you to say, you know, touch a part of the screen and go, I want to put this here, I want to align this with this. It doesn't seem like rocket science, but nobody's really done it before.
AR: Yeah. Yeah.
SO: You know?
AR: Yeah, and that definitely comes from the technology side of things and just being able to have a very, you know, capable, I mean, we're still obviously working on it, it has a long way to go, but the underlying technology to support, you know, multi-touch and gesture support, it is possible with our technology. And so we're just super excited to even have, you know, today we've got some examples of DoubleTap and its potential use in interaction with Braille, and already people are pretty excited about it. So that's been fun to see.
JM: Very cool. Now you mentioned the technology, one of the big challenges as multi-line Braille displays are becoming a thing is that screen readers were never built for them. They're all built for single line displays, and I know there's been a bit of a work with the EBRF working group and some others to try to work on this, but what are you finding as you try to interface this with a screen reader like JAWS or NVDA or VoiceOver?
AR: Yeah, I mean, it's going to have to be a team effort. I mean, we're at this point trying to reach out and work with screen reader companies to try to figure out now that multi-line is coming and it's inevitable, how can we get, you know, the screen reader software to really leverage the power of multi-line? And that's ultimately what is going to make it useful, right? So I mean, right now, as it stands, screen readers are only really useful for single line. They're just designed for single line. And so even with our display right now, sure, we can make it compatible with JAWS, but it's not in doing so going to leverage the real benefit of having multiple lines. It's just going to be one line spilled over to the next, is kind of how we've been thinking about it. What we found is these companies are definitely very interested and they want to work with us and other companies because they know it's coming. You know, they want to be there and be able to support multi-line because it will change for the better how blind people can use braille. I mean, it's just, that's it.
SO: I think there's a fundamental thing that, you know, the fundamental difference too, which is that screen readers are currently designed to follow focus, right? So they bring you to where the focus is, and then you have to kind of figure out the context for yourself. On a braille display, you put your hand down and you find all this stuff around, you know, you have context and then you kind of move towards focus and that's kind of a very different way of thinking. And I'm not sure that screen reader manufacturers can think about how to, you know, move in this kind of upside down world where you get context before focus, as opposed to the world they're familiar with, which gives you focus before context.
JM: I feel like too, you know, looking at multi-line displays, it may not necessarily be right, the text that's under your finger. Maybe you want the bottom line to be a status line. Maybe you want the whole display to be a dashboard that's displaying a whole bunch of information that's being updated. There's a lot of different ways that even the same information in the same app, people might want to configure it differently, right?
SO: Yeah. And that context too will change depending on what you're doing, right? Because if you're working with an Excel sheet, for instance, you might want to be able to see, oh, let me give me an overview of everything. Let's see what, how many rows and columns and which ones are filled and so on. And then you might want to, that could be even not even braille, it could be just a dot display. Yeah. And then you could zoom in and look at any column or any row. Then once you go, okay, I want to do this. I want to move this here. I want to-
JM: Let's lock column A.
SO: Yeah, exactly. And just kind of think in a completely different way to the way that screen readers are allowing us to think right now.
JM: A lot of fascinating ideas for this as far as looking with screen readers, looking with other things. Are you focusing mostly on text at the moment or are you thinking towards graphics as well?
AR: Yeah, I'd say graphics is in the back of our mind and we actually started as a company with that. I'll say, I mean, it was in the forefront of our mind, but we at the moment are very laser focused on braille. Our device that we're sharing today is a multi-line braille display. The nice thing is we have the capability under the hood to do eventually what is a kind of uniform dot tactile graphics display, but we just recognize that there's a hole. There's a gap in the market. Multi-line braille, I think is something that people want and something that we can provide and are hoping to be able to sell a product to fill that need. And so that's where our focus is. We can't obviously focus on everything at once. And so we've picked this and are very passionate and excited about it.
JM: So I happen to know since I've been over to your offices and done a little bit of research for full disclosure, one of the things you're really thinking about is how big should this be? Is it three by 24? Is that the latest idea? Are you still kind of playing with that and taking feedback this week or what are you thinking for the size and how much cells it's gonna have?
AR: Yeah, definitely still taking feedback. I mean, I'll say it's a I think it's close to what we think we'll try to shoot for for our first product, but definitely not. We're not settled on that yet. And and for sure, our underlying technology is capable of doing, you know, changing those dimensions quite easily. It's really at the end of the day, it's it's what makes sense for the user as well as the cost point. And we have a lot of decisions still to make in both those realms.
JM: We kind of skimmed over the physical description. I didn't ask earlier because I wasn't sure how final of a product you are showing. But what are you showing as far as like how big is the display on the table and what are you looking at?
AR: So it's a three line, 24 cell display. It's eight dot Braille. And so with that, we're able to use the standard cursor computer Braille. And then the device itself has a Perkins style keyboard, similar to what you would find in most refreshable Braille displays, as well as some additional keys that add functionality that's specific to it being a multiline display. So those are ones that are new, right? They don't necessarily have a comparison to existing single line displays. And so we're playing around with ways to utilize those in the context of rendering multiple lines and interacting with multiple lines. So that's something we're still exploring. And then as well, there are some of the more standard sort of router keys that you might expect in some devices.
SO: The footprint is about what would you say?
AR: Oh, sure. Yeah.
SO: Ten by...
AR: I think Thomas, our product lead, he said what we want to keep it to is something that's definitely smaller than a laptop. So something that would fit in front of a laptop and on a table so that you can easily move back and forth between it. So that's kind of what we're shooting for. The device itself right now is about an inch thick. And, you know, the size of the Braille, gosh, you know, I should get the dimensions and I'll send them along to you because, you know, it'd be hard for me to... But you can fit it in a backpack.
JM: It sounds like that's the goal, right? For sure. Is it battery powered as well?
AR: At the moment, no, no, it is not battery powered.
JM: And is that the final goal?
AR: I should say our goal in the immediate future is to make it so that it's a desktop style device.
JM: So USB powered.
AR: Yep. USB connected. So connect to a computer via USB or Bluetooth and it would be tethered to a unit nearby that's helping provide the power and the air, which we didn't get into. But the underlying technology and how it works is dependent on that.
JM: Well, let's get into that.
AR: Yeah.
JM: So, yeah, compressed air. So what is exactly happening? I know you can't tell your trade secrets, but you talk about air and bubbles and things like that. So what is happening there?
AR: Yeah, just that. So, I mean, under the pins that you can feel on the surface, which are just rigid pins that feel just like the piezo ones that are out there, there are these little bubbles that push them up and down. Those bubbles are driven by compressed air. And at the moment, what's doing the compressing of the air is a little box that sits a distance away from the device itself. And so you can kind of think of it as like a power brick that you would have your laptop powered with. So this is something that sits, you know, three to six feet away from your device and can kind of hum along and is white, noisy and is separate from the device itself. And so it kind of separates those two things.
JM: OK, yeah. So how much noise does it make or what is the refresh rate like?
AR: Refresh rate and noise, two separate things there. But, yeah, I mean, the noise is something that we're very open about. You know, we know that that's something that needs to be mitigated and trying to find ways of reducing that as much as possible. And you've certainly gotten to experience different degrees of that. And, you know, in the end, we know we need to get to to make it a viable product as something that's not going to be annoying, like a little bit of background hum is OK, but something that's clinking and clanking away is just not going to work. So and then, yeah, refresh rate wise, you know, yeah, definitely just, you know, completely different from the issue of noise and the compressor. But I think right now we're sitting at definitely under one second for a full refresh. The thing I'd like to note there is that we haven't got any comments about it. That's kind of what I think about is, you know, someone starting to say like, oh, like this is really slow, that makes me scared. But as of, you know, we haven't demoed it for too long today. But yeah, so far, so good in terms of how people feel about it. Maybe I'll ask some more focused questions on that, though, now that you've put it in my head.
JM: So this is your first day and a half and your first CSUN. How is the experience been? And have you learned anything that you were maybe surprised to learn from customers so far, as far as their impressions, Sile?
SO: I think everybody is really pleasantly surprised by the Braille. And, of course, always when you bring a Braille display anywhere, you're nervous about that because, you know, the Braille ultimately has to feel right. Because that's the product. And, you know, everybody has commented and said it feels really nice. So that I think is great. And people do like the touch feature, like the cursor routing, double tap cursor routing feature. And so, yeah, and people do comment about the fact that it does need a compressor. So that's the downside. But other than that, I think people are very positive and very supportive and really want to see the product succeed. That's what we're learning, isn't it?
AR: Yeah. And I mean, from a personal standpoint, I'm just really happy to be able to bring the team here. And we've worked very hard on what we've brought. And it's just good to see people liking it, you know, and getting a chance to finally. I mean, again, I've been working on this for so long and Sile as well. And, yeah, it's just really exciting to be able to share.
JM: It has to be a good feeling, right? Just even when the hall opens up for the first time and you're, yeah, that just has to be.
SO: And I think for the back office team, like the engineering team, too, they're all with us here and they're all helping to demo. Yeah. And for them, it's it's such a, you know, the end of at least this part of the project to see it out in the hands of the people that they, you know, they want to serve and they want to reach for them, I think, has been a really great,
JM: lots of success and also probably lots of things to take back
SO: Absolutely, lots to learn.
JM: by the time you get to the end of this.
AR: Oh, yeah, we're not done yet.
SO: No, no, by no means.
JM: Well, so what is the timeline looking at as far as the work to do and then potential release?
AR: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, we are really focused right now on trying to get what we're calling a pre-production prototype done by this summer. So what we brought today is, you know, the closest thing that we think to what a product would look like. We're going to go back home and after this, take what feedback that we got and essentially try to get to a point where we know what it is that the first product will look like. And then by the end of the year, be in a position to manufacture that product and try to sell our first, you know, 10 to 100 devices in the next year.
JM: Any idea on price point yet? We do not have a price point. And I know that's obviously a pretty important one, but, you know, I don't anticipate it being in the thousand dollar range, but I also don't anticipate it being over ten thousand dollars either. So, I mean, it's it's going to be similar to the devices that are on the market today. And that's one thing that, yeah, sorry, there's someone over here with a like a robot rolling around our floor here that's just bumping into us.
JM: I love it.
AR: But yeah, the price point is something that we still have to figure out.
JM: So. Very cool. If people want to get more information about new haptics and follow the development, what's the best way to do that?
AR: Yeah. So you can go to our website, which is just newhaptics.com. That's N-E-W-H-A-P-T-I-C-S dot com. And there you can find a contact page if you ever want to get in touch with us. And that's probably the best way, because all those emails just come directly to me.
JM: So awesome. Thank you so much, both of you. I really appreciate you coming on.
AR: Yeah.
SO: Thank you.
AR: Thank you so much for having us. Appreciate it.
Announcer: This has been another Blind Bargains audio podcast. Visit BlindBargains.com for the latest deals, news and exclusive content. This podcast may not be retransmitted, sold or reproduced without the express written permission of A. T. Guys.
Patrick Perdue: Copyright 2024.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
