e-skin: research into wearable interfaces, cross-modal perception and communication for the visually impaired on the mediated stage

Today our cultural events are dominated by visual information based on sight and sound, but hardly at all on the combined senses of touch and sound. Very little theatre, dance or art events exist in which visually impaired people can participate. While compensated audio-description or talking books are standard products that these people can buy to imagine feature film stories or decide what is happening on the stage, computer interfaces are not often designed which promote communication between impaired actors. Nor are they designed to allow them to navigate and control audio-visual information on the digital stage or present cultural events to sighted audiences. Our research group is interested to address these problems by constructing ergonomic human computer interfaces (HCI) that can explore the above problems including research into orientation, cognitive mapping and external audio-visual device control. Furthermore, the unique cross-modal potentials of human sensory perception could be augmented by electronic devices, which in turn might communicate with sighted audiences. Consequently, we are implementing our discoveries in artificial systems that can interact intelligently with people on the real digitally mediated stage.