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This story is from the category Augmenting Organics
Date posted: 02/05/2010 Without vision it's impossible to interpret facial expressions, or so it's believed. Not any more. Shafiq ur Rehman, Umea University, presents a new technology in his doctoral thesis - a Braille code of emotions. "It gives new opportunities for social interactions for the visually impaired," he says. Lacking the sense of vision can be very limiting in a person's daily life. The most obvious limitation is probably the difficulty of navigation, but small details in everyday life, which seeing people take for granted, are also missed. One of those things is the ability to see a person during a conversation. Facial expressions provide emotional information and are important in communication. A smile shows pleasure, amusement, relief, etc. Missing information from facial expressions create barriers to social interactions. ?Blind persons compensate for missing information with other senses such as sound. But it is difficult to understand complex emotions with voice alone,? says Shafiq ur R?hman. His thesis addresses a challenging problem: how to let visually impaired ?see? others? emotions. To make this possible the research group has developed a new technology based on an ordinary web camera, hardware as small as a coin, and a tactile display. This enables the visually impaired to directly interpret human emotions. ?Visual information is transferred from the camera into advanced vibrating patterns displayed on the skin. The vibrators are sequentially activated to provide dynamic information about what kind of emotion a person is expressing and the intensity of the emotion,? he explains. See the full Story via external site: www.physorg.com Most recent stories in this category (Augmenting Organics): 04/05/2013: Printable 'bionic' ear melds electronics and biology |
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