Low-fi skin vision: a case study in rapid prototyping a sensory substitution system

We describe the design process we have used to develop a minimal, twenty vibration motor Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution (TVSS) system which enables blind-folded subjects to successfully track and bat a rolling ball and thereby experience 'skin vision'. We have employed a low-fi rapid prototyping approach to build this system and argue that this methodology is particularly effective for building embedded interactive systems. We support this argument in two ways. First, by drawing on theoretical insights from robotics, a discipline that also has to deal with the challenge of building complex embedded systems that interact with their environments; second, by using the development of our TVSS as a case study: describing the series of prototypes that led to our successful design and highlighting what we learnt at each stage.

[1]  Metin Akay,et al.  Wiley encyclopedia of biomedical engineering , 2006 .

[2]  V. Braitenberg.  Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology , 1984 .

[3]  Marc Rettig,et al.  Prototyping for tiny fingers , 1994, CACM.

[4]  Andy Clark,et al.  Reasons, robots and the extended mind , 2001 .

[5]  H. Hendriks-Jansen.  Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought , 1996 .

[6]  A. Clark,et al.  Books , 2004, INTR.

[7]  E. Nagel.  The structure of science : problems in the logic of scientific explanation , 1961 .

[8]  Michael Schrage.  Cultures of prototyping , 1996 .

[9]  Alva Noë,et al.  Action in Perception , 2006, Representation and Mind.

[10]  P. Bach-y-Rita,et al.  Sensory substitution and the human–machine interface , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[11]  R. A. Brooks,et al.  Intelligence without Representation , 1991, Artif. Intell..

[12]  P. König,et al.  Beyond sensory substitution—learning the sixth sense , 2005, Journal of neural engineering.

[13]  Massimo Banzi,et al.  Getting Started with Arduino , 2008 .

[14]  Jon Bird,et al.  The evolved radio and its implications for modelling the evolution of novel sensors , 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. CEC'02 (Cat. No.02TH8600).

[15]  Stephen W. Kercel,et al.  Human Nervous System, Noninvasive Coupling of Electronically Generated Data into , 2006 .

[16]  Inman Harvey,et al.  Evolutionary Robotics: A New Scientific Tool for Studying Cognition , 2005, Artificial Life.

[17]  Masatoshi Ishikawa,et al.  Augmenting spatial awareness with Haptic Radar , 2006, 2006 10th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

[18]  R. Hepburn,et al.  BEING AND TIME , 2010 .

[19]  Richard Menary.  Attacking the Bounds of Cognition , 2006 .

[20]  Andy Clark,et al.  Natural-Born Cyborgs? , 2001, Cognitive Technology.

[21]  B. Webb,et al.  Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? , 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[22]  N. Humphrey.  A History of the Mind , 1992 .

[23]  Malcolm A Maciver.  How building physical models can reduce and guide the abstraction of nature. , 2001, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[24]  Tom Froese,et al.  Toward a Phenomenological Pragmatics of Enactive Perception , 2007 .

[25]  Michael Eisenberg,et al.  Fabric PCBs, electronic sequins, and socket buttons: techniques for e-textile craft , 2009, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[26]  BENJAMIN WHITE,et al.  Vision Substitution by Tactile Image Projection , 1969, Nature.

[27]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Bringing Design to Software , 1996 .