The Future, a Thimbleful at a Time

Wirelessly connected to an iPhone, the Thimble would be an interface of parts: scanner, translator, voice-activated command module… perhaps the most enticing application is as a sort of Braille ebook reader�a prospect charismatic enough to make me want to learn to read Braille.

Alas, a refreshable haptic Braille display remains a holy grail of sorts; attempts to create readable Braille outputs using vibrating dots or electrical pulses or tactile illusions remain evocatively fictional. Another concept device, the Haptic Braille, which won a Red Dot Award for design, would incorporate a Braille readout in a mouselike device; scanning text and translating it as a series of Braille impulses rendered on the device’s soft, biodegradable surface.

Of course, any good concept device should incorporate biodegradable material�or Kryptonite, or Unobtanium�wherever possible. There’s a whole growing rhetoric unique to design fiction, a poetics compounded of scifi, aesthetics, and marketing pitch; it makes me wonder what university will be the first to offer an MFA in concept-video production.

On the other hand, it’s a marvelous techno-cultural impulse to see the differently-abled�the blind, the deaf, the whole spectrum of what conventionally gets called disability�as avatars of compelling sensory and kinesthetic worlds instead of objects of revulsion and pity. At its worst, such curiosity focuses on sensuous exotica; at its best, it gives birth to transformational technologies.

[via Core77]