See Color With Sound
Have you ever wondered how people with vision impairment get dressed? How do they know what goes with what, what matches? Texture and touch can only tell so much but color has to be seen, not felt. In fact if a person is born blind, how do they know what a color is at all? It’s a labeling system almost entirely based on visual feedback. The Bright-F aims to translate that information into sounds.
It detects the brightness, saturation, and hue of color. You can sort thru like colors by organizing them in groups with similar tones. This is incredibly useful for washing basic garments because we all know a white undie doesn’t do so well with a red t-shirt.
Designer: Lifeng Yu
If you liked this design, you would also be interested in:
- World Carpets Collection by Marcel Wanders
- Coin Sized iPod by Jlennon
- Color Security
- Move a Round Speaker by David Granath
- Sound Hive
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This is brilliant!
what happens if you point it at a mirror?
Simple ideas are usualy the best.
I agree this handy design is brilliant
F’ing brilliant.
If the designer is reading this — you will be receiving at least 3 awards for this product, guaranteed.
I’ll bet anyone who claims otherwise.
Such a perfect simple concept.
The design language (aesthetics) are nice, but could be refined a bit. Think more about the function, simplify the device even more. The user is blind, how does that affect the feel/weight/aesthetic/human factors of the exterior/styling….
What happen is, lets says i make this product into a glove instead, but this glove aint covering the fingers, so letting the user still able to sense the texture of the object he/she touching. The color sensor senser will be located below the palm.
Perhaps rather then by sound, the glove also can provide different tone color feedback by HEAT feel. For example, RED but the glove feel kind of little cold to indicate that the color ratther a little dull/dark.
And at the same time, you dont have to look weird like pointing a torchlight while shopping or feeling the object surrounding. But, this maybe be too complicated? Hahaha….
Lim, I like the ‘idea’ of the glove. But, that’s an extra step, to strap on something. And theres no point ’strapping up’ when you’re likely going to use the device for short spans of time. I’m not sure what the magic number is, in relation to time in minutes, but there is certain tasks where just holding the device is less important than it becoming strapped to you. Think about a remote control… or even a computer mouse.
The wand is great because you just pick it up and start checking for color. I’m seeing this most useful in the mornings, in the intimacy of the user’s home, when getting dressed to go out into the real world. Another benefit of the wand is that you can hold it with one hand, while you feel the texture with the other hand. Or pull the fabric up to the light while you feel it.
Create the situation in your head. Alarm wakes the user up. They go to the closet…
Where are they going to keep it / store it? How about on a hook next to the closet. So add a lanyard strap to the wand. Just an idea. Otherwise, this is a fairly small object that can get lost among house keys, cell phones, pens, all the other small stuff we carry. What about a texture on the exterior? The user is blind, they should have an experience with the device that makes the experience interesting.
The temperature thing is a good idea, but also way more expensive. A lot of energy required to change the material from hot to cold or even cool, very quickly. Once its hot, it likely will remain hot. Plus, the blind are more used to having sounds be their communicators, rather than hot/cold. Think crosswalks, with beeping sounds for the blind. The hot/cold Is a great idea, but a foreign idea to their lives. It would be easy and cheap to add the sound like your initial concept. Plus, the user is familiar with this idea. And most visually impaired people are most sensitive to sound than others, so they could understand a large range of colors with sound.
This is a great project. I would be thinking about how to take it places. I have more ideas for you, but you may or may not want them.
Haha… I guess the temperature thing does makes the product more expensive and at the same time, does it actually provide an obvious results…… Kind of testing needed.
But about the comments on the 1st paragraph, i think what i am trying to do is to bring this product not only for short period of time, or perhaps this was the intended style by the designer himself.
But, imagine if we are blind, dont we really wish too see? To imagine? Why it has to be short period of time? Comparing to a remote control or even a mouse, i don’t think it’s a fair comparison. This is because we are talking about an eye. We dont watch TV all the time, but our eyes need to see most of the time. Why would we restrict the user to only certain period of time?
Seriously, if we ourself were blind and we have this stick thing, would we just used it for clothing purposes? The glove it just another form that mean to free both hand of the user.
But what if you were blind from a very young age/birth and you have no mental reference for color?
This doesn’t seem very helpful. If you are blind, one would be more concerned about the style of the clothing probably more than the color, in which case you’d have somebody helping you anyhow. If you are colorblind, that you’re a guy and don’t give a crap about what you’re wearing anyhow.
Well, it might be of SOME use to a blind person, but doubt it would be the clothing issue.