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Company with a Vision
Karen Yourish
FEELING BLACK AND WHITE: Pins on the tactile mouse allow the sightless to view computer images |
Arieh Gamliel has been blind since birth. As a child, he "saw" the world via an embossed plastic atlas designed for the sightless which was put out in 1957. By the 60s, when Gamliel started using it, he says "the map of Africa was out of date."
Today, Gamliel is a consultant in the development of technology which enables visually impaired youngsters and adults to observe the world�s constantly shifting borders, as well as maps of their own neighborhoods, with the aid of a personal computer and a special mouse. And that�s only the start, say Roman Gouzman and Igor Karasin, who immigrated from Russia in the early 90s and founded a company called VirTouch in 96. They claim their Virtual Touch system will enable the sightless to appreciate a Picasso painting, drive a racing car in a computer game and read text from the Internet and word programs in both Braille and ordinary raised letters.
Other computer-for-the-blind products on the market, says CEO Gouzman, are cumbersome, clumsy and prohibitively expensive. Virtual Touch, he claims, is compact - consisting of a specially designed computer mouse and software - and, at $4,500, costs a third of competing Braille systems. What�s more, no other system gives the blind access to computer graphics and enables those who don�t know Braille to read computer text in raised conventional letters, Gouzman asserts.
Virtual Touch�s special mouse employs three tactile displays, each containing 32 rounded pins that respond when the cursor on the computer screen touches a graphic display or letter. With three fingers, a blind person can feel the curvature of lines and shading of computer graphics. (Up is black and down is white and shades of gray are somewhere in between.) When the cursor is placed on text, the pins create either Braille symbols or standard alphabet letters, depending on the user�s preference.
Eldad, who�s 21, has been testing Virtual Touch for the last few months at the Jerusalem Institute of the Blind. Today he�s going on a virtual bicycle ride down a busy street. With the mouse, he "pedals" up a sidewalk, represented visually by a white line and tactilely by non-protruding pins on the mouse. Cars beep when he veers into the street, and the pins simultaneously pop up. "Terrific!" the computer shouts in Hebrew when he completes the route.
Riding bicycles and racing cars are more than just games - they provide the blind with the ability to orient themselves. "I can understand more about directions," enthuses Eldad. "I can feel left and right and create the whole picture in my mind."
Psychologist Gouzman spent 15 years at the Russian Academy for Psychology in Moscow before immigrating in 1992, and now is a senior researcher at Jerusalem�s International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, a non-profit institution that develops learning methods for the disabled.
He got the idea of creating a computer program for the blind in 1995, after he met electrical engineer-computer specialist Karasin. "Sight is simultaneous perception, and touch is sequential. Blind people know how to connect one part to the next and feel the whole," he explains. "And there�s no reason why the blind can�t have access to computers, like the rest of us."
Working out of their kitchens, Gouzman and Karasin tried a number of solutions before they came up with the tactile mouse. In 1996, they presented a primitive model to the Jerusalem Software Incubator, a Ministry of Industry and Trade project set up to help former Soviet scientists turn their technical ideas into businesses. The incubator ponied up about $325,000 from investors, enough to hire four employees and create a prototype.
After two years of development, the prototype was tested in 1998 by 22 blind individuals. "It�s a very good product for blind children," notes Nechama Lev-Ari, an Institute of the Blind teacher who�s used it with students Eldad�s age and younger.
Once the development stage was over, VirTouch needed capital to go into production and launch a serious marketing effort. It raised $1 million in private placements via the Jerusalem-based A. Heifetz investment bank and is now seeking an additional $1.25 million prior to the commercial launch of the finished product this summer. The mice will be assembled in Israel; design and testing are carried out at VirTouch�s offices in Jerusalem�s Har Hahotzvim high-tech park.
The market is substantial: an estimated 17 million blind people in Europe, the United States and Japan, which business manager Lee Kaplan says amounts to as much as $1 billion for various educational products. He can�t estimate VirTouch�s sales or its slice of this massive market, but says there are already agreements with distributors in England and Sweden, and ones on the way in France, Norway and Germany.
Part of the vagueness is natural, given the newness of the product. "I can�t say that Virtual Touch is really going to take off," says consultant Gamliel, now a Jerusalem municipal rehabilitation worker with the blind. "I simply don�t know yet, for sure. But I have no doubt that better access to computers and high-tech will bring blind people a step closer to becoming first-class citizens." In addition to keeping up to date with what�s new out of Africa.
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