 Good afternoon and welcome to likeable science here on think Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen and likeable science it is today. We're gonna talk about a new device I mentioned and our guest to help us discuss this is Howard Kaplan. He's joining us from Florida. Welcome Howard. Thank you very much for having me Ethan. Good to see you. Howard is a biomedical engineering PhD candidate at the University of South Florida and he's also the manager of the Advanced Visualization Center. So that sounds like a pretty spiffy title. Yeah it's a very unique title. So can you tell us a little bit about the center and what you do there? Sure the center is a campus-wide resource for the University of South Florida where students, faculty, and researchers can come and explore how they can integrate advanced technologies into their research and academics. So we offer lots of different technologies and we help students and faculty not only use them but develop for them. So some examples might be using virtual reality or augmented reality or even 3D printing within their academics and it spans all different disciplines from arts and sciences to mathematics and even business. Yeah I can see that visualization can have a lot of applications in different disciplines. I know they use some here at the University of Hawaii in a studying groundwater reservoir so. Yeah. But this particular product that we're talking about are your tactile maps. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how this came into being. Sure well myself in my family I have relatives both young and old that have some visual impairments where they're low vision or they're completely blind and not only that but even seeing some of the students that we have on campus some amazing individuals that go through academics and have a great academic career have some trouble or at least have some challenges when it comes to navigation and so I thought that maybe there would be a better way to introduce some kind of device using 3D printing that would enable them to have a greater sense of you know their their area and the environment around campus especially when it comes to navigating interior spaces. So that's really how the tactile maps came about. In retrospect it seems like such an obvious idea make use of the keen sense of touch that many blind people develop and not have them or try to rely on big signs or whatever they're not going to read. Yeah well most most of the things that are available to blind and low vision are text based you know they read using Braille or raised text or they get a lot of audio information but that information is kind of static or stale it's just giving given to them in that one form in that one way they really don't have a device where they can explore on their own and build their own understanding in their own relationship so it seems like a no-brainer to try and use 3D printing for it but the difficult aspect of it was to create symbols and textures that would allow them not only to to feel everything correctly but to build understanding of what those textures and symbols actually meant. Right but the advantage right away you can see is that your maps are not a linear process like reading text that they give a two-dimensional at least sense of the place. Yeah exactly. You had to develop the coding as it were right to tell them what made doorways, stairs, elevators, emergency exits. Yeah exactly we had to come up with methods that would allow them to understand that what they were touching had meaning according to the objects and physical navigation of the space and that's really when user testing was very helpful you know it's easy for me as a sighted person to say oh this represents a door or this represents stairs but it's a totally different thing when you're working with these individuals and you actually kind of get a perspective of how they're kind of mentally interpreting the world around them through touch. Right and you were saying there's no real coding that's been developed for this there's no standardized set of symbols to represent these things so you had to develop all this de novo in conjunction with the people who are using them. Yeah there's there's no real set standard of this represents this and that represents that it's kind of ad hoc because there's really no easy method for producing these tactile visuals or these tactile instruments typically you would have to kind of send away what you want to create or you know if you want an image to be embossed or raised or anything like that that has to be sent away and then it has to be made and and typically it's just taking an image that a visual person sees and just raising that up so using its color so it really didn't have much meaning for this user population. Right so let's maybe show that first picture that really shows what these maps look like. So can you tell us sort of what what what this is? Yeah so in this image I have one of the study participants who's been blind since birth they use a cane as their mobility device and right now they're testing two maps and they're kind of comparing different tactile features of these maps and letting me know which ones they prefer and kind of how they're navigating about and one of the kind of main things that we wanted to do especially with university maps was introduce the evacuation routes in the map so in case of an emergency these are the ways that you can exit the room safe within there because a lot of the times they're given a guided tour and in that guided tour they're only shown one way in and out of the classroom and not really exploring multiple options and definitely not their emergency routes. Yeah and your maps would show them that they may have a standard entry but there are exits. Yeah exactly yeah yeah excellent excellent this was very iterative process then. Yeah it is extremely iterative process and that's what 3D printing allows us to do very quickly. You know you can you can produce a lot of maps with 3D printing with different textures and different symbols and different heights and sizes in combinations of symbols test them with the users get feedback and by the next day you could produce another map that's a physical map that they could test out again so this was a very iterative process where we were testing maps we were testing various symbols and things like that all the time. Right because there are a bunch of different aspects as you're saying how high how low how small all these things will influence usability. Yeah exactly we have to make sure that you know the spacing is correct that you know we don't try to jam too many symbols into one area because that can negatively impact the readability of the map and then if you have too much space then it's not readable either so there's we're looking for that optimal amount of information space and kind of comprehension within the entire map. Right because these maps then aren't exactly a perfect physical representation of the space right? Right they're not a physical representation they're not a measurement per measurement a scale you know representation of the physical space it's more of an abstract to somebody who cited representation of the space that somebody who is blind and low vision for them so far the maps have seemed to work out in terms of them reading and actually using the maps and understanding. Right so we have a third picture here. Yep yeah so this is another individual we tested with many different age groups from I would say the teens all the way up to about 65 70 years old because we wanted to get many different types of users users that may have some experience with tactile graphics or path file maps some that have not had any experience at all some people that knew the facility that they were navigating to some extent and others that had no idea about the facilities that they were in and also different fingertips sensitivities and different sizes of course and different levels of kind of tactile literacy which is very important. Yeah that's all those key aspects that you've worked out now that's really great. So getting these into use now? Yeah we're starting to get them into use in office spaces where there are employees that are low vision or blind individuals who work for various companies and they have to navigate to the cafeteria or the elevator and they have to go through buildings that are multi levels and have to find other co-workers within that space so we've developed maps for companies maps for training facilities where blind individuals are kind of learning how to use a cane or learning how to get back into the workplace and definitely within the use of these maps to some of the faculty and students that may need to use a classroom or a building. Excellent this is really good and this shows how you're applying new science new technology into a real practical daily impactful situation. Yeah exactly and I think you know there's there's obviously room to grow and room to build and that's what we hope to do and we hope to share this with the rest of the community and continue working to make these resources available to everybody. Right and the cost of 3D printing is dropping all the time right? Yeah it's you know the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper it's getting kind of more efficient where that's biocompatible and bio-friendly for fairly inexpensive. I think you know the the challenge with it is that even if you have a 3D printer you still have to understand the encoding system and how to build the maps by using a 3D soft or a CAD soft. That's kind of where the next phase of our research. Excellent and maybe we'll dig into that in the next half but right now we're going to have to take a short break. We'll be back. Howard Kaplan will join us again in the next half and I'm your host Ethan Allen here on likeable science. Hello I'm Dave Stevens host of the Cyber Underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1 p.m on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us we're always giving you current relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Hey Stan the energy man here on thinktecawaii and they won't let me do political commentary so I'm stuck doing energy stuff but I really like energy stuff so I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the energy man at lunchtime at noon on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy especially if it begins with the word hydrogen we're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner how we can make the world a better place just basically save the planet even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore we got it nailed down here so we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the energy man. Aloha. And you're back here on likeable science I'm your host Ethan Allen here on thinktecawaii. Thanks for coming back and joining us for the second half of this wonderful episode on tactile maps we have Howard Kaplan down in Florida is with us remotely here and Howard has developed these amazing 3d printed maps to enable blind or low-sighted people to get a tactile sense of rooms spaces buildings find all the different ways in and out of a room the different exits so they have a better sense of the different options rather than just been shown a single route and it's apparently allowing them to really navigate much more independently now welcome back Howard. Thank you very much. So you were saying before the break a little bit that you are beginning to get these out into into various workplaces and around your campus more so can you I mean what kind of reports are you getting back from the people about their use? Yeah well you know we've been conducting this study for about four years now and when we started we were kind of definitely on the wrong track but through the iterative process we've gotten great feedback and I think now currently you know we're starting to see these maps utilized in various places here in the Tampa area out in the community and at the university and we've gotten great response and we've seen a lot of interest from other people so part of the next phase that we want to do is try to build a way for others to be able to create these maps themselves. Right because you have obviously some coding to generate that 3d product right and make certain ridges of certain heights and widths and corners and symbology and you have to if you want to share that you're going to have to sort of organize that and put it out in some sort of a manual right that people can look at and learn to learn that way. Definitely yeah definitely we want to share the kind of guidelines and different measurements and all of the the kind of data we have so that's kind of the first phase of this but also we're working on kind of building an application that will allow non-technical individuals to develop these maps on their own computer because right now for me it's a very manual process of designing and fixing and having to do all the measurements and everything like that so somebody who's not very technical it would be very difficult to do this kind of work and also understand those guidelines at the same time so we're working on building an application that will allow an individual to use a 2d image or drawing or a blueprint and recreate the maps for 3d printing or at least to build a 3d model that can be produced in different methods but have the same guidelines and parameters that the tectonic maps we create have. Oh it sounds very challenging because you're dealing with a lot of different different features they are right that they have to take into account so that must be it. That's a whole other that's a whole other aspect where we start dealing with you know user testing for the application itself so that we can test whether or not it's easy to use for the non-technical users so it's a whole different study but it's very important in allowing these maps to have a broader and wider accessibility range. Right because you can only make so many of them right how many what's your time to make to generate one of these maps? Well now I can make them fairly quickly because I have the symbol set and things like that so it takes me an hour or two depending on the parameters of the of the interior space to build them and then of course we've got to print them and printing can take a long time depending on the the size of the map but yeah I can't make these maps for every button right and instead of just kind of you know like I said we can throw out the guidelines where you know here's what symbols and here's the measurements and everything like that but once you have those you still need to have the the other skills as well so it's kind of very important that if we want these to kind of continue we offer a more user-friendly and efficient way to create the maps. Yeah and that's yeah that's going to be a very interesting sort of phase two of your project because in theory then they could really go they could go national or even international and and that would be a great thing I'm sure I'm sure there's a huge potential user audience there. Sure. Yeah but sort of getting to that point where they can be easily enough produced by enough people in enough places is has a huge set of challenges behind it. Yeah we're building out the computer application so that we can have user testing so that we can begin to see what the features need to be and close to having our first phase of user testing on that and we've had results back from generating the models and from 3D printing that have been very good so now it's just a matter of again the user testing of that to make sure that we're putting out an application that is user-friendly. Excellent and in your notes here that you sent me you referred to something called a what do you say here a mobile-based audio haptic map that sounded very impressive but I couldn't quite envision what what you meant. Yeah so a haptic device would be a device that gives the user feedback tactually so you know if you're using your mobile phone you'll get vibration back and that is haptic feedback you know you can feel your phone physically but you know just like you just like anyone to feel the maps but getting course feedback or types of means is the haptic aspect of that and then of course the audio aspect of that would be hearing some kind of information about what you are touching or what you're feeling on the haptic device so part of what we're doing with this application that we're building is we realize that not everybody has 3D printers or a way to manufacture the map so an alternative might be to now that we have the information in the application of the area you want to create is to convert that also to a haptic map that would give you give the user feedback when they run their fingers across it and when they hit certain areas they would get audio cues as to what that area was on the map so this is something that we're also developing out there because low vision users that have tablets and mobile phone devices as well right and that should make sense with you know sort of scan the space with your with your phone or your tablet and have it and tell you about the various features and yes the alert issue if you're walking too close to a wall or coming up on a chair or something right yeah and you can get either an audio alert or a vibration alert that tells you you know this you know you need to stay on this travel destination or you're moving too far left too far right or you're coming up to a doorway or something like that would be very important right and it seems like are these other technologies both the cameras the sort of object recognition technologies that are getting better and better all the time a little bit of the AI that's coming out will be of great help in this then right sure yeah i mean it it has a long way to go but yeah it'll definitely be a great help in understanding especially how to kind of talk to that user using various methods again if the talking is actual audio or if it's haptic feedback how can we use the mobile devices features to signal those to users and and again it's the same type of thing we need to figure out what those haptic or audio signals are that are optimal for the user right you'll have to again have a develop a whole symbology a whole sort of alphabet or a dictionary of of buzzes uh vibration codes or whatever right that that everyone sort of understands and part of that is to make all that intuitive too right yeah yeah you have to make it intuitive and so that it's relatable i mean i remember when i had one participant especially testing the maps for her feedback for the evacuation routes that have a kind of a bumpy texture was oh these are these are very bumpy but when i when i run my finger across them they kind of alert me because i can feel them i can feel how kind of gritty they are and that reminds me of an emergency and that's kind of what we're looking for we're looking for that relationship to say you know yes even though this symbol might be hard to use in terms of always having to run your finger across it in this case we want that because it signals that this is the emergency route so this is the route that you should take so we're constantly looking for that type of feedback from many users before we actually choose which kind of encoding we use in the map excellent hey well this is great Howard i i so much appreciate your coming on the show here and telling us about this incredible new uh technical or technology that you've developed and i look forward to hearing about about it more thank you so much and uh thank you for this need and i hope you will come back and uh see us here next week on likable science here on think tech hawaii until then