 I'm with the Touch Graphics folks here. I've got Steve Landau and Lindsey Yazzolino and everybody I had lunch with said we ought to come over and see what Touch Graphics is doing. So what are you guys doing, Steve? So Touch Graphics is all about tactile information presented in a universal context. So we're trying to make materials that are usable by everybody but are fully accessible to people with disabilities including visual impairment. It's still accessible to the sighted as well. Exactly, and fun for everybody to use and informative and helpful to the general audience. Okay, so what have we got here? So this is an example of one of our talking maps. Lindsey do you want to talk about that a little? Definitely, definitely. So this is actually a map of the Google campus, the Google headquarters located in New York City and it is actually in the process of being mounted on that campus. So the idea behind it is that the map itself is tactile, so when you touch it you can feel the different rooms and the pads, some of the office spaces, but as you can also hear it's also providing audio information. So if you for example were to touch one of the elements on the map, so this is for example this bumpy stuff, that's an office cube and if I were to touch it a second time, 4C327 is the actual room number. I'm going to describe this a little bit for the sighted folks too. This is a giant Android tablet, what is it about? Two, three, two and a half feet across. It's a 24 inch diagonal Android tablet. And it's got an overlay on it that's in color, that shows us the office numbers, but there's also these little bumps that she's touching that then allow her to have it read to her of what the different things are on the map. Do we want to show an example of the overlay on its own? Let's show them the tactile skins, you'll see the whole picture. So this is the one of the tactile skins and they're holding this, it's basically the same kind of overlay but we're feeling it with our hands just in space. Yeah, so this is one of the skins and yes the idea is that you would set this on top of the map. The skin itself actually has an NFC tag on it so that when you lay it down on the map, on the tablet which has an NFC leader, it detects the code on the map and because the tablet has software which shows what's in each of the coordinates of the map, it will automatically then load the data for that map. I was going to ask, wait a minute, how does the tablet know it's on the overlay but no, you jump right to it. And Steve, did you want to explain the process, kind of the idea of the technology behind the printing? So we've discovered the kind of an interesting new way to make tactile graphics and tactile graphics as I think Lindsay has explained are raised line and textured diagrams, pictures, maps, all kinds of different spatial representations that we can now feel by touching with our fingers. It's not just like a Braille map, it's more than that. Well it uses Braille in some places but it's lines and textures, not Braille and that's because we're trying to show people for example where the stairs are, where the elevator is, where the map you are here point is, where the bathrooms are. And for each one of those is a different tactile symbol that you can feel very easily and we make these maps with a very special kind of printer that can lay down a gel, a liquid which is then cured. You know when you go to the dentist and they put that purple light in your mouth? Yeah, yeah, I hate that. Yeah, so that, we like it, because what it does, that ultraviolet light cures the liquid that the printer lays down and it turns into a hard raised line and so we can control the height of those lines and create kind of a hierarchy where we have some very light things, these textures are very low and light, these travel routes are kind of high and smooth and then the steps, try to feel that little step, you'll see it's kind of like a little staircase. Yeah, just a little tiny thing coming up versus the travel route which is much bigger. Exactly, so once we've created this overlay we can place it on the Android tablet and because this material is so thin your finger still activates the touch screen right through. Oh, that's the real trick, so that's okay. And we struggled with this for a long time, we developed a lot of different prototypes to try to get it thinner and thinner and thinner, but we were doing it with like engraving on a plastic sheet and it started cracking, it was so painful and frustrating but then we discovered this new printer and it solved all of our problems. Wow. And the lines that it produces are so precise that not only are they easy to feel, but when I first saw them I was just blown away by how crisp and how nice aesthetic. So easy to understand. You understand and I just kept wanting to touch it because it was so clear. I like it, so it's a perfect UI basically for you. So who do you market to, do you sell these to regular companies or how do you produce your products? Well, we do lots of different markets because we're in a funny kind of business where these very small groups of users sometimes, so in order to really build up our business we're trying to reach out to museums, to schools, libraries, businesses. I had a lady from the CIA over here at the table earlier today and she thinks that this would be a really nice technology for their headquarters in Langley. Of course, I told her all the tablets have a microphone so you can talk to them and she said, oh no, no, no microphones. I'm not surprised, not surprised one little bit. So, but a regular business that's got a bunch of office buildings they could contract with you directly. Exactly, that's what we're trying to accomplish. And so right now we're working with a great company, Google, who is sort of you know, interested in innovation and demonstrating what they think are good technologies and promoting things like that. So we're hoping to maybe do more work with them. All right, so let's take a quick break here and we're going to move scenes because I want to find out why there's a horse head behind me. Okay, we're going to tell you all about the horse. Okay, we've moved over by the sculptures. What are we looking at, Lindsay? So we're looking at several things. The one in particular is this sculpture. It's a Buddhist, oh well, it will tell us what it is actually. Listen, it's going to talk to us. This is a reproduction of a Chinese Buddhist sculpture. The actual work of art made around 1150 AD appears elsewhere in the museum. The original sculpture is extremely rare and one of the most important Chinese objects at the San Diego Museum of Art. You may touch this reproduction with your hands. As you explore it, you will hear the names of parts that you touch. If you continue touching a single part, you will hear a description of that part and explanations about the sculpture and the people who created it. Begin touching now or wait for more general information. So have you guys created this? Yes. The San Diego Museum. I'll start touching it. Go ahead and touch the feet. Is it internationally known as the feet? I'll keep touching it. Guan Yin stands on bare feet. Notice the toes, heels, and soles of the feet. So I'm moving my hand around. Okay. All right. Can we make it stop? Because I want to hear what you've done here. This is very cool. This is a 3D-printed replica of a priceless Chinese sculpture from the collection of the San Diego Museum of Art. So they came to us and they said, well, we have blind visitors who come to the museum. We'd like to make some versions of some of our most important artworks that are really accessible for this population. So we started by going to the museum, carefully removing the glass case on this precious artifact, and then we scanned it digitally using our iPhones. It's an amazing thing. You take your iPhone and you take hundreds of photographs of the object from all different angles, all different directions. All those photographs are then processed on a computer program and it creates a digital model of the form. So we created the digital model, then we sent that file to a 3D printer. The 3D printers are in wide use right now and they're really magical machines, but they can create objects like this. Once we had the 3D print, which by the way comes out as a monochromatic plastic object, we painted it with a special kind of paint and that paint has an amazing property. It can actually detect where you're touching on this. So it's through the paint that it's sensing that I grabbed her hand. Correct. Wow, that's pretty cool. Well, it's a really versatile, simple, and inexpensive way to make objects like this that people can experience all different ways. We know that little kids love to touch things. We all love to touch things. Yeah, adults do and I think most adults just have had to learn not to. Our first words are don't touch. I know adults somehow think you can get boring and not touch things anymore but we want to show that that doesn't have to be the case. I think that's a perfect place. You guys have a lot more to show but if people want to learn more about Touch Graphics, where would they go? They can go to touchgraphics.com on the internet or they can call us at 800-884-2440. Great, thank you very much Steve and Lindsay. This was fantastic. Thank you so much Allison.