The Haptic Video Player: Using Mobile Robots To Create Tangible Video Annotations

Video and animation are common ways of delivering concepts that cannot be easily communicated through text. This visual information is often inaccessible to blind and visually impaired persons, and alternative representations such as Braille and audio may leave out important details. Audio-haptic displays allow for the presentation of complex spatial information, along with accompanying description. We introduce the Haptic Video Player, a system for authoring and presenting audio-haptic content from videos. The Haptic Video Player presents video using mobile robots that can be touched as they move over a touch screen. We describe the design of the Haptic Video Player system, and present user studies with educators and blind individuals that demonstrate the ability of this system to render dynamic visual content non-visually.