Patent awarded for ITL’s Roberts’ Refreshable Scanning Tactile Graphic Display

On April 1, 2008, NIST was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,352,356, “Refreshable Scanning Tactile Graphic Display for Localized Sensory Stimulation”; inventors are John Roberts, Information Access Division and Nicholas Guttenberg, former student in ITL. This invention enables devices allowing users to “view” text, Braille, and imagery using the sense of touch, both for accessibility for blind users, and for enhancing a virtual environment. Unlike haptic display, which uses force feedback to “push” against the user’s muscles, tactile display makes use of the finely detailed, scanning sense of touch in the fingertips. Tactile display can be combined with haptics, for example allowing a user both to squeeze a virtual orange and to feel its textured surface. Tactile display can be used for teleoperation (greatly improving the user’s control of a robot built with a sense of touch), and even (with future miniaturization of components) to give detailed sense of touch to the gloves in an environment or pressure suit.

The user places a finger against a fingertip-sized display surface with hundreds of “stimulus points”, typically round-tipped pins, which are set in a pattern that is rapidly updated as the user moves the finger and the display, creating the sensation that the finger is moving over a detailed surface matching the imagery in the controlling computer. The display can be mounted on a computer mouse or in the fingertips of a data glove.

NIST innovations include use of pressure or force-based touch stimulus rather than specified displacement of the pins, use of differential pressure to convey tactile information, and use of human skin’s natural elasticity to help control the pins. All of these are directed toward achieving a good match to the human sense of touch, and toward improving manufacturability and lowering cost.

ELIA Life Technology, Inc. of New York, N.Y. has licensed this technology for accessibility applications. The company has also licensed another NIST patent, No. 7,009,595, for a low-cost two-dimensional tactile graphic display for accessibility.

Contact:  John Roberts (ITL), ext. 5683.