Blind Bargains

Audio Transcript: #CSUN14 Audio: Tactalis Presents Visual Information Magnetically

Below is a transcript of #CSUN14 Audio: Tactalis Presents Visual Information Magnetically. We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.

Finding new and innovative ways to present visual information has been an ongoing challenge over the years. Tactalis is a new company which is using magnets moved around an LC screen to present spacial and other information to a blind user. Tactalis Ceo Douglas Hagedorn joins us to explain his vision for the technology and how it all works in this podcast. Blind Bargains audio coverage of CSUN 2014 is generously sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.

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Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.

J.J.: We are here with Doug Hagedorn. He is the CEO of Tactalis, and Tactalis is a new way to provide an interface for a touch screen, but using magnets in a sense, I guess. Doug’s going to tell us all about it. Welcome to Blind Bargains.

DH: Thanks very much.

J.J.: You probably have a much better description than I just did, so go ahead and tell us a little bit. What is Tactalis?

DH: Tactalis, what we’ve done is we’ve created a product that’s designed to help people who are blind and visually impaired and can’t see graphics or images or diagrams on an LCD screen or a printed page, have a way to interact with physical representations of those diagrams and images. So what it is, we have a standard LCD screen, and underneath it we’ve created our own hardware that’s an array of magnets that we can turn on and off.

You could activate a magnet, if you were looking at something like a map of the San Diego transit system. As you scan your finger across and arrive at these magnetic points, you’d know that you’d arrived at a station. And the system is tracking your hand, so when you get to a magnet, it knows you’re there. It then announces via text-to-speech, conference center or harbor or airport, things like that.

J.J.: The magnet, though – you’re wearing this little thing on your finger.

DH: Yeah, exactly. You do need to have something metallic or magnetic to actually sense the field. Either a little thimble or a ring on your finger, or a stylus that’s got a magnetic tip.

J.J.: So you move around to a location; the magnet will stop your finger at a particular point, and then it will stop. What’s the array of the magnets? What’s the density of that?

DH: The density that we’re working with right now is 16x9, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s actually pretty useful. You can do a lot of things like monthly calendars, games of Sudoku, crosswords, that sort of stuff.

J.J.: Sure. Right, that gives you 144 points. That’s roughly – how big of a touch screen is that on?

DH: It’s 16x9 inches.

J.J.: Okay, so one per inch.

DH: Yeah, essentially. The pixels themselves are half an inch across, and they’re spaced half an inch apart.

J.J.: Okay. Right now you’re running this on Windows, I guess?

DH: We’re running on Windows right now. It works really well with the firmware that actually runs the technology underneath, but we are looking at things like Android and iOS.

J.J.: Why do you choose magnets over other ways to present spatial information, tactile information, such as haptic or even lower tech stuff like just Braille and tactile diagrams?

DH: There’s two unique stories behind that. One is that when I started this, I was doing a Master’s degree in the field of cartography. So I was doing a lot of reading about the loss of one of the primary senses and things like that.

But at the same time, I was really interested in people who were blogging in the piercing and tattooing community. What I came across was a blog from some guys in Toronto, and what they had done was they had actually implanted magnets under their fingertips. The idea, you could implant a magnet under your skin, and instead of piercing something, you could just stick the earring or the ornament onto their skin.

J.J.: Onto the magnet. Wow.

DH: Yeah, exactly. So what they found, once their skin healed up, is they actually started to be able to sense magnetic fields. So they’d walk through a metal detector in a store or they’d be typing on a laptop and the hard drive would spin up, and they’d actually be able to sense that. So I was reading these blogs, and they were talking about this really fantastic new sixth sense, at the same time as reading all this other academic literature about the loss of one of the main five senses.

So I kind of put those two things together, and once I started digging into it, what I realized is that using magnets, because they’ll pass through different materials, actually lets you start to create layered images. If you think of – in a lot of ways, Photoshop and maps and things like that use layers to show where different things are happening in the same place. You have a bus stop on a bus route on Main Street in San Diego in California, right? And the visual context, that’s all done with transparency and overlaps and things like that. That’s something you can’t do with Braille, because you only get what the texture on top is.

But because magnets will pass through different materials – they’ll pass through an LCD screen, they’ll pass through a thermoform or a raised line Braille print – we can actually start to create those layered images that let you pack in a lot more information into the display.

J.J.: I noticed when we were playing with this a little earlier, you have some situations where maybe you could have a couple different magnets for say a transit route and have it pull from one to the other?

DH: Yeah, exactly. There’s lots of different ways that we can guide the user around the scene, either through activating and deactivating different magnets and different arrangements of magnets, but also things like providing cues to say “your finger is at Location B3, and the station that you’re looking for is at Station E5,” which suggests that you need to go to the right and up and that sort of stuff.

We can also do things like vibrational crosshairs. Instead of painting around to try and find the location you’re looking for, we just set it up so you scan across, and when you hit the vibration, you know that you’re on the X or Y axis of the point that you’re looking for.

J.J.: You’re here at the conference, you’re trying to get a lot of user feedback from showing this here; what are you hearing from users, and what are they saying that’s good and bad?

DH: People are really interested. The sensation of the device is really unique, so everybody’s eyes and smile kind of light up when feel it. A lot of what we’re getting is concern about what sort of content you could provide, what are the good resolutions and things like that, and that’s concerns that we’re looking for feedback on. What do people want to see first? What are the most important tactile graphics and apps? Things like that that we need to provide. And other things like price point and stuff like that are other concerns.

J.J.: What is your thinking for price point? How do you make this a product? What would it cost?

DH: What we’re looking at right now – and we’re doing a really small first production run because we know that the first generations is going to change a lot. What we’re doing at the conference is kind of opening it up. We’ve done a package that’s $5,000, which sounds like a lot, but it’s $3,000 for the device, and then included for anybody who gets in on the first production run is a content license that provides access to any content and software that comes afterwards. That’s only for the first 50 or 100 people that actually take the plunge on this run.

And then what we’re looking at is we’d really want to decrease the price of the hardware as we go down so that we can get it into more people’s hands and have them download and purchase software as it becomes available.

J.J.: Does the cost come because it’s a limited run, or is it because the cost of magnets are high?

DH: A bit of both, yeah. The fewer you make, the more expensive the production is.

J.J.: Sure, fair enough. Obviously you want to get a lot of feedback and testing. If people want to learn more about this or get more information, what might be the best way to do that?

DH: Just contact us at Tactalis.com.

J.J.: Go ahead and spell that.

DH: T-a-c-t-a-l-i-s .com, and it’s just the same on Twitter. It’s @tactalis. That’s probably the best way to go. The website just launched. We’re adding new information as we go, and we want to encourage people to check back and let us know what they think.

J.J.: Great. Thank you so much, Doug.

DH: Thank you.

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