skip to main content
10.1145/3132525.3132549acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesassetsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Designing Interactions for 3D Printed Models with Blind People

Published: 19 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Three-dimensional printed models have the potential to serve as powerful accessibility tools for blind people. Recently, researchers have developed methods to further enhance 3D prints by making them interactive: when a user touches a certain area in the model, the model speaks a description of the area. However, these interactive models were limited in terms of their functionalities and interaction techniques. We conducted a two-section study with 12 legally blind participants to fill in the gap between existing interactive model technologies and end users' needs, and explore design opportunities. In the first section of the study, we observed participants' behavior as they explored and identified models and their components. In the second section, we elicited user-defined input techniques that would trigger various functions from an interactive model. We identified five exploration activities (e.g., comparing tactile elements), four hand postures (e.g., using one hand to hold a model in the air), and eight gestures (e.g., using index finger to strike on a model) from the participants' exploration processes and aggregate their elicited input techniques. We derived key insights from our findings including: (1) design implications for I3M technologies, and (2) specific designs for interactions and functionalities for I3Ms.

References

[1]
Animal Cell - Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:689381. Accessed: 2017-04-04.
[2]
Autodesk Meshmixer: http://www.meshmixer.com/. Accessed: 2017-05-04.
[3]
Brown, C. and Hurst, A. 2012. VizTouch: automatically generated tactile visualizations of coordinate spaces. TEI '12, 131-138.
[4]
Brule, E., Bailly, G., Brock, A., Valentin, F., Denis, G. and Jouffrais, C. 2016. MapSense: Multi-Sensory Interactive Maps for Children Living with Visual Impairments. CHI '16, 445-457.
[5]
Buehler, E., Hurst, A. and Hofmann, M. 2014. Coming to grips: 3D printing for accessibility. ASSETS '14, 291-292.
[6]
Buehler, E., Kane, S.K. and Hurst, A. 2014. ABC and 3D: opportunities and obstacles to 3D printing in special education environments. ASSETS '14, 107-114.
[7]
Davidson, P.W. 1972. Haptic judgments of curvature by blind and sighted humans. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 93, 1 (1972), 43-55.
[8]
Good, M.D., Whiteside, J.A., Wixon, D.R. and Jones, S.J. 1984. Building a user-derived interface. Communications of the ACM. 27, 10 (Oct. 1984), 1032-1043.
[9]
Götzelmann, T. 2016. LucentMaps: 3D Printed Audiovisual Tactile Maps for Blind and Visually Impaired People. ASSETS '16, 81-90.
[10]
Hatch, M. 2013. The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers. McGraw Hill Professional.
[11]
Hatwell, Y. 1987. Motor and cognitive functions of the hand in infancy and childhood. International Journal of Behavioral Development. 10, 4 (Dec. 1987), 509-526.
[12]
Hatwell, Y., Arlette, S. and Edouard, G. 2003. Touching for knowing: cognitive psychology of haptic manual perception. John Benjamins Publishing.
[13]
Hofmann, M., Harris, J., Hudson, S.E. and Mankoff, J. 2016. Helping Hands: Requirements for a Prototyping Methodology for Upper-limb Prosthetics Users. CHI '16, 1769-1780.
[14]
Kane, S.K. and Bigham, J.P. 2014. Tracking@ stemxcomet: teaching programming to blind students via 3D printing, crisis management, and twitter. SIGCSE '14, 247-252.
[15]
Kim, J. and Yeh, T. 2015. Toward 3D-Printed Movable Tactile Pictures for Children al Impairments with Visual Impairments. CHI '15, 2815-2824.
[16]
Klatzky, R.L., Loomis, J.M. and Lederman, S.J. 1993. Haptic identification of objects and their depictions. Perception & Psychophysics. 54, 2 (1993), 170-178.
[17]
Kolitsky, M.A. 2016. 3D printing makes virtual world more real for blind learners. e-mentor. 1 (63) (2016), 65-70.
[18]
Lederman, S.J. and Klatzky, R.L. 1993. Extracting object properties through haptic exploration. Acta Psychologica. 84, 1 (1993), 29-40.
[19]
Lederman, S.J. and Klatzky, R.L. 1987. Hand movements: A window into haptic object recognition. Cognitive Psychology. 19, 3 (1987), 342-368.
[20]
Lipson, H. and Kurman, M. 2013. Fabricated: The new world of 3D printing. John Wiley & Sons.
[21]
McDonald, S., Dutterer, J., Abdolrahmani, A., Kane, S.K. and Hurst, A. 2014. Tactile aids for visually impaired graphical design education. ASSETS '14, 275-276.
[22]
Morash, V.S., Pensky, A.E.C., Tseng, S.T.W. and Miele, J.A. 2014. Effects of using multiple hands and fingers on haptic performance in individuals who are blind. Perception. 43, 6 (2014), 569-588.
[23]
Morris, M.R. 2012. Web on the Wall: Insights from a Multimodal Interaction Elicitation Study. ITS '12, 95-104.
[24]
OpenStreetMap Buildings: https://osmbuildings.org/. Accessed: 2017-04-04.
[25]
Reichinger, A., Fuhrmann, A., Maierhofer, S. and Purgathofer, W. 2016. Gesture-Based Interactive Audio Guide on Tactile Reliefs. ASSETS '16, 91-100.
[26]
Rovira, K., Deschamps, L. and Baena-Gomez, D. 2011. Mental rotation in blind and sighted adolescents: The effects of haptic strategies. Revue Europeene de Psychologie Appliquee. 61, 3 (2011), 153-160.
[27]
Saldana, J. 2015. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Sage.
[28]
Scouten, E.L. 1967. The Rochester method, an oral multisensory approach for instructing prelingual deaf children. American annals of the deaf. 112, 2 (Mar. 1967), 50-5.
[29]
Shen, H., Edwards, O., Miele, J. and Coughlan, J.M. 2013. CamIO: A 3D computer vision system enabling audio/haptic interaction with physical objects by blind users. ASSETS '13, 1-2.
[30]
Shi, L. 2015. Talkabel: A Labeling Method for 3D Printed Models. ASSETS '15, 361-362.
[31]
Shi, L., McLachlan, R., Zhao, Y. and Azenkot, S. 2016. Magic Touch: Interacting with 3D Printed Graphics. ASSETS '16, 329-330.
[32]
Shi, L., Zelzer, I., Feng, C. and Azenkot, S. 2016. Tickers and Talker: An Accessible Labeling Toolkit for 3D Printed Models. CHI '16, 4896-4907.
[33]
Shi, L., Zhao, Y. and Azenkot, S. 2017. Markit and Talkit: A Low-Barrier Toolkit to Augment 3D Printed Models with Audio Annotations. UIST '17.
[34]
Stangl, A., Kim, J. and Yeh, T. 2014. 3D printed tactile picture books for children with visual impairments. IDC '14, 321-324.
[35]
Symmons, M. and Richardson, B. 2000. Raised Line Drawings are Spontaneously Explored with a Single Finger. Perception. 29, 5 (May 2000), 621-626.
[36]
Szpiro, S., Zhao, Y. and Azenkot, S. 2016. Finding a store, searching for a product: a study of daily challenges of low vision people. UbiComp '16, 61-72.
[37]
Szpiro, S.F.A., Hashash, S., Zhao, Y. and Azenkot, S. 2016. How People with Low Vision Access Computing Devices. ASSETS '16, 171-180.
[38]
Taylor, B., Dey, A., Siewiorek, D. and Smailagic, A. 2016. Customizable 3D Printed Tactile Maps as Interactive Overlays. ASSETS '16, 71-79.
[39]
Teibrich, A., Mueller, S., Guimbretière, F., Kovacs, R., Neubert, S. and Baudisch, P. 2015. Patching Physical Objects. UIST '15, 83-91.
[40]
Textured Earth - Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17336. Accessed: 2017-04-04.
[41]
The Peachy Printer - The First $100 3D Printer: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-printer-the-first-100-3d-printer-and-sc. Accessed: 2017-05-05.
[42]
Wobbrock, J.O., Morris, M.R. and Wilson, A.D. 2009. User-defined gestures for surface computing. CHI '09, 1083.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)How Can Haptic Feedback Assist People with Blind and Low Vision (BLV): A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/371193118:1(1-57)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Revisiting visual accessibility with non-textual content: challenges and solutions for human-computer interactionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702105(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2024)A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in CookingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642233(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Designing Interactions for 3D Printed Models with Blind People

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    ASSETS '17: Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
    October 2017
    450 pages
    ISBN:9781450349260
    DOI:10.1145/3132525
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 19 October 2017

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. elicitation
    2. exploration behaviors
    3. interactive 3d printed models
    4. visually impairments

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    ASSETS '17
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    ASSETS '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 126 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

    Upcoming Conference

    ASSETS '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)125
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)24
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)How Can Haptic Feedback Assist People with Blind and Low Vision (BLV): A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/371193118:1(1-57)Online publication date: 13-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Revisiting visual accessibility with non-textual content: challenges and solutions for human-computer interactionProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702105(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
    • (2024)A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in CookingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642233(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)When Refreshable Tactile Displays Meet Conversational Agents: Investigating Accessible Data Presentation and Analysis with Touch and SpeechIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345635831:1(864-874)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
    • (2023)Brave New GES World: A Systematic Literature Review of Gestures and Referents in Gesture Elicitation StudiesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/363645856:5(1-55)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023
    • (2023)ShapeSonic: Sonifying Fingertip Interactions for Non-Visual Virtual Shape PerceptionSIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Papers10.1145/3610548.3618246(1-9)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2023
    • (2023)A Case for Improving the Accessibility of Electrical and Computer Engineering Education – Starting with a Blind Student's AutoethnographyProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614551(1-8)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
    • (2023)TouchPilot: Designing a Guidance System that Assists Blind People in Learning Complex 3D StructuresProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608426(1-18)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Designing Conversational Multimodal 3D Printed Models with People who are BlindProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3595989(2172-2188)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Understanding (Non-)Visual Needs for the Design of Laser-Cut ModelsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580684(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media