ABILITY @Sight City 2025

Last week, members from the consortium, and in particular Siemens, OFFIS and CEA, presented various demos at Sight City 2025 in Frankfurt for 3 days. We presented the localised tactile feedback on a 10.5 inch tablet resembling a standard tablet, i.e. running on Windows and with a visual display, the AI pipeline and how it could analyse the elements of an image and create corresponding automatic sonification (and future tactile feedback), and finally a demo of the exploration of tactile graphics attached to a tactile device to integrate touch interactions triggering speech on demand (for the future 2D pin display).

We had a very intense and exciting experience! So many people with fond interest and valuable feedback, from all horizons and backgrounds, from industrials, to teachers and target users, from blind to deafblind and deaf individuals. Of course, difficulties were also noted about feeling elements with vibrotactile feedback, and we will do our best to improve this as much as possible, including with the combination with speech/sounds. In any case, we would like to extend a big thank you for sparing us a bit of time to test our demos and for your feedback and enthusiasm! It's really motivating and we will do our best to keep you updated as asked about our progress.

As next steps, we will integrate the AI with the tactile feedback and audio in the tablet, in parallel work on a demonstrator integrated into the Inside One, a product from Inside Vision, and finally, in parallel, conduct final usability evaluations with the target users in Autumn. We will be conducting studies in France, Germany and Lithuania, so if you’re interested, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Similarly, don’t hesitate to write to us about any questions or potential collaborations!