This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Immersion Corporation will lower barriers that blind and visually impaired students experience in science education. Electrostatic fields, aerodynamics, molecular attraction, and mechanics are examples of undergraduate topics that intensively utilize visual media such as plotted data, computer graphics, and illustrations. Immersion has developed low-cost computer mouse capable of force display. This mouse will enable students to feel forces generated by simulations of these phenomena, turning inaccessible abstractions into tangible reality. The proposed work will develop enabling software for Internet force feedback and will apply it to a demonstration module designed for blind and visually impaired students. A team of blind scientists and educators will evaluate the application over the Internet. The next phase of the research will continue enabling software development, concluding in-depth assessment of outcomes using visually-impaired novice learners, and it will expand implementation to multiple educational sites. This project will provide essential steps in integrating persons with disabilities into Word Wide Web based learning technologies. While a number of investigators have examined the potential for mapping visual information to the sense of touch, to date, these have not proven commercially viable. Immersion's proposed touch surface, however, has the potential to meet accessibility needs of the blind and visually-impaired while achieving volume economies through mass-market appeal.
