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R&D

Approach

To make our technology as accessible as possible, our R&D process places emphasis on openness, modularity, affordability, ease of use, construction, and modification, rather than prioritizing performance, aesthetics, or size.

Whenever possible, we prefer to adopt a participatory design approach by involving the target users from the project's inception, acknowledging their expertise in their own experiences and needs.

We strongly encourage everyone to openly share their ideas and actively seek feedback from the community throughout the development process.

That said, if you happen to be passionately inclined to create a marshmallow-roasting flamethrower with tactile feedback in your basement, please feel free to adapt our projects according to your needs and do what you believe is best for both the project and yourself. By the way, we would absolutely love to see a picture of your marshmallow-roasting flamethrower with tactile feedback!

Goals:

The first goal of development will be the codesign, construction, and user testing of the tactile-navigator(pending). It is the project for my doctoral thesis and has been developed based on academic research, user experiments, years of efforts, and the partnership of multiple universities, research centers, and community organizations. This very early prototype embodies the R&D approach of LibreTactile, and as such, there is plenty of potential for contribution.

The second goal will be to adapt this technology to benefit other fields like XR, gaming, neuro rehab, multimodal communication, music learning, etc.

The third goal will be to design, manufacture and distribute different "consumer ready" tactile interfaces (as affordable as possible).

These are my priorities for now, and progress will likely be made in parallel some of the time.

Current projects

Our projects are as modular as possible, so everything will be interconnectable, to maximize the reusability of components between projects.

The projects are built from a few base repositories: stimulation mechanisms, interface designs, control and communication modules, and software plug-ins.

The following diagram illustrates this principle: Modular Repos

A complete project is made of hardware and software components. The hardware component is made up of an arrangement (interface design) of stimulation points (stimulation mechanism module) controlled by a microcontroller (control and communication module). The software module is an application, browser extension, plug-in, or library that controls the behavior of the hardware component and enables advanced functionalities.

Tactile Navigator

An assistive technology device to help visually impaired users navigate the internet.

  1. Open hardware modules:
    1. Stimulation mechanism: mini disk vibrator motors.
    2. Interface design: Tact-matrix: A tactile stimulation matrix made up of multiple tactile stimulation points.
    3. Control and communication: Arduino USB CDC control module.
  2. Open software modules:
    1. Tactile Navigator Web browser extension. A chrome extension that extracts the hierarchy of a webpage and sends it to the serial port (to be displayed by the tactile navigator hardware).

Tactile VR Glove

A tactile interface to bring tactile stimulation to VR experiences.

  1. Open hardware modules:
    1. Stimulation mechanism: mini disk vibrator motors.
    2. Interface design: Tact-glove: A tactile stimulation glove made up of multiple tactile stimulation points adapted to fit the fingers.
    3. Control and communication: Arduino USB CDC control module.
  2. Open software modules:
    1. Plug-in for Unity3D.

Future projects

  1. Open hardware modules:
    1. Stimulation mechanisms:
      1. Optimization of shape memory alloy actuator.
      2. Experimentation with another driving mechanism (electromechanical, piezoelectric, etc).
    2. Interface designs:
      1. Stimulate patches of skin.
      2. Braille cells.
    3. Control and communication:
      1. USB HID controller (i.e. raspberry pi pico).
      2. WIFI/Bluetooth.
  2. Open software modules:
    1. Compatibility with other operating systems and mobile.
    2. Tighter integration with JAWS/NVDA.
    3. AI functionalities for assistive technology ( summarization, image description, structure from formating, automated navigation agent & WARIA regions, etc.).
    4. Implementation in other apps: Plug-in for books/pdf, excel/tables, programming, gaming, video-tactile calls.